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Minor amusement
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The removable basket is insufficient and tends to remove itself from the poles it hooks on to. The rests for the arms or forearms are hard plastic and in this weather one sweats into them, and (possibly confined to me) they cut off circulation to the hands so my little fingers go numb. Intended for a feature but is actually a bug: if you collapse the walker sideways so as to allow passage into letussay narrow doorways, it also collapses forwards. This is for easy storage in the trunk of the car everyone owns, that takes you to wherever you're going. But it makes it extremely difficult to enter a store whose door is up a step and that opens outwards, like the banh mi place. So I will not be doing this again in a hurry. I know I've walked over to nearly Dufferin before and not died, and my phone would have me believe it's shorter to there than to nearly Spadina, but psychologically, as I've said before, west is much much farther than east.
However it's a much different crowd west than east. In addition to the many cafés that have sprung up west of Ossington it also has most of the city's Ethiopian restaurants. On the way I passed an Indian gentleman in saffron robes taking the sun and a very large Grand Pyrenees in its summer-unfriendly shaggy coat. Coming back I passed an Asian family (I think: two adults and a teen/ early 20s guy who may or may not have been together) notable in that the younger guy was reading a hardcover book as he walked and didn't stop reading, or even look up, when he had to stop for a red light. What was engrossing him so? The lettering on the spine was faded but I could still make out 'Middlemarch'. Sugoi.
As for the walker, well, I shall still use it as long as I'm not intending to do anything but walk.
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Culinary
This weeks bread: a loaf of Dove's Farm Organic Heritage Seeded Bread Flour, v nice.
Friday night supper: penne with bottled sliced artichoke hearts.
Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, strong white flour - perhaps just a little stodgy.
Today's lunch: kedgeree with smoked basa fillets - forgot the egg due to distractions and basa cooking rather more slowly than I had anticipated, still quite good - served with baked San Marzano tomatoes (we entirely repudiate the heretical inclusion of tomatoes in kedgeree but they are perfectly acceptable on the side), and a salad of little gem lettuces quartered and dressed with salt, ground black pepper, lime juice and avocado oil.
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The Pinetum, Bicton Park

Stopped off at Bicton Park Botanical Gardens on my drive down to Exmouth at the weekend, and although the sky was full of featureless white cloud, and the light really horrible for photography, had a fabulous time wandering round the gardens. There are a few pretty flower beds in the Italian Garden and the Rose Garden, but Bicton is not really a flower garden. It's a place to visit if you love conifers, or strange things growing in glasshouses.
( Coniferous interlude )
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Gloomy gray morning
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Saturday night
I was short on sleep and didn’t get as much done as I would have liked. Actually I was sleeping better when the bedroom was hotter, because then the fan felt good. Now the fan is necessary or I’m too hot, but it makes my shoulder too cold. Twelve more nights until my room is comfortable again!
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Have been fighting a desire for Vietnamese coffee with coffee jelly, as provided by a Banh Mi place two subway stops west of here. Viet coffee has condensed milk and I don't need the calories, and the coffee jelly is sweetened and I don't need the sugar. Thought about ordering in, but you can't order just two coffees and I have no change for tipping. Thought about walking there, which would burn calories, but that stretch of Bloor was having the Koreatown festival, which I know from last year makes Bloor impassable. Elbows are unhappy today and taking the rollator there felt like too much. Thought of using the upright walker instead, but it's a wide beast that takes up 3/4 of the sidewalk and is not what one wants on a summer Saturday when everyone is out and about, even on the sidestreets. Especially the dog walkers, of which there are many many in the last five years, often with two or three dogs apiece. So I stayed in with the fans on and vegged.
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Irish dialects
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Saturday floral report
Roadkill limited to one gray squirrel and a number of Unidentified Flattened Objects.
Got out on the bike, up to the golf course and across to the road through the bog and thence home. Warming up out there, 77 F when I finished. Did not die.
15.31 miles, 1:28:25
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C1/C2 Welsh course
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Some v misc things
The Case of the Missing Romani American History:
The history of Romani Americans is missing. Although the experiences of other marginalized and immigrant American groups are now well-represented in mainstream historical scholarship, Romani Americans remain absent from American history. This absence has detrimental effects to Romani Americans who are placed outside historical time. It also harms scholars whose work could benefit from the placement of Romani people in the histories they tell.
***
A ‘new Canterbury Tale’: George Smythe, Frederick Romilly and England’s ‘last political duel’:
In the early hours of 20 May 1852, six weeks before polling in that summer’s general election, two MPs travelled from London to woodland outside Weybridge in a bid to settle a quarrel provoked by the unravelling of electioneering arrangements in the double-member constituency of Canterbury. Frederick Romilly, the borough’s sitting Liberal MP, had issued a challenge to his Canterbury colleague George Smythe, whose political allegiances fluctuated and who had notoriously been embroiled in four previous prospective duels. The pair, accompanied by their seconds, who were also politicians, exchanged shots before departing unscathed. None of the participants faced prosecution but neither Smythe nor Romilly was re-elected.
A challenge to a duel was in fact by this time a common-law misdemeanour, and killing one's opponent counted as murder, though apparently there were few prosecutions in either case. It is perhaps disillusioning to the readers of romantic fiction to discover that politics seems to have figured so heavily as the casus belli.
***
Do not foxes have the right to enjoy the facilities of the public library system? London library forced to briefly close after fox 'made itself comfortable' inside - this was a London library, rather than the London Library.
***
Two entries in the People B Weird category:
Sylvanian Families' legal battle over TikTok drama:
Sylvanian Families has become embroiled in a legal battle with a TikTok creator who makes comedic videos of the children's toys in dark and debauched storylines. The fluffy creatures, launched in 1985, have become a childhood classic. But the Sylvanian Drama TikTok account sees them acting out adult sketches involving drink, drugs, cheating, violence and even murder.
(What next, Wombles porn?)
And
I'm 16 and live entirely like it's the 1940s (I bet he's not eating as though rationing is still in force, what?):
"I liked the clothing, how they dressed, and the style," Lincoln explained. "Just the elegance of how everyone was and acted... with the time of the war, everyone had to come together, everyone had to fight, and everyone had to survive together.
"Most people back then said it was scary, but it was quite fun to live then, and they could go out, help each other and apparently there's not that much stuff today that is similar to what that wartime experience was."
Lincoln said he loved the music of the time, including Henry Hall, Jack Payne and Ambrose & His Orchestra.
The teenager's wardrobe was also entirely made up of clothes from the era, which he said he preferred to modern-day clothes.
He even cycles on a 1939 bike when out and about researching and finding items for his collection.
We wish to know whether he gets woken up by a siren in the middle of the night to go and huddle in the nearest air-raid shelter. Singing 'Roll out the Barrel'.
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Minimalist post
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Variety!
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I'd heard about this, but good grief, it's actually in BLOOMSBURY!!!
I don't know if anyone else has clocked this, which sounds like another of those vexatious cases brought by Christian homophobes, about the rainbow pedestrian - or as I was wont to call them in my youth, 'zebra' - crossings. The logic is, shall we say, convoluted.
Camden resident Blessing Olubanjo has told the local authority to get rid of the three blue, pink and white-painted pedestrian crossings... or else she would begin judicial review proceedings. She complained that the markings, installed in 2021 during Transgender Awareness Week, infringed her rights as a Christian and constituted “unlawful political messaging”. In a letter to the Town Hall, she said: “As a Christian and a taxpayer, I should not be made to feel excluded or marginalised by political symbols in public spaces.” Ms Olubanjo has been supported by Christian Legal Society, which has cited a section in the Local Government Act 1986 prohibiting councils from publishing material that appears to promote a political party or controversial viewpoint, and the crossings were a form of ‘publication’.
(Okay, it is part of the larger campaign which is about anti-trans actions and whingeing about not being allowed to
But where is this that she is protesting?
Why, in the very heart of Bloomsbury, and not just Any Old Bit of Bloomsbury ('living in squares, loving in triangles') but Marchmont Street.
Where we may find the iconic Gay's the Word bookshop as featured in the movie Pride (inaccurately described there as being in Soho) and a blue plaque for Kenneth Williams, and close by one for Boulton and Park.
Anyway Camden Council '“entirely rejects” her argument, and [said] that the borough has “no place for hate”' and the views of local people taken by The Local Democracy Reporting Service were very much on the side of leaving the crossings be.
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Oh what a relief
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Cooler!
J's mom is thinking of visiting here with his dad in September or without him in October, so we exchanged various emails about that today. I think it mostly depends on how comfortable J's dad thinks he would be, so we'll see.
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Booklog 43/2025: Ben Aaronovitch: Stone and Sky – Rivers of London #10
DS Peter Grant and his extended family are trying to take a holiday in Scotland - Aberdeen to be precise. There's his partner, Beverley, a minor riber goddess, their twins, cousin Abigail (and DCI Nightingale who is training her in the arcane arts). And then there's Peter's mum and his dad, and old jazz musician, plus his band and their disreputable manager. Dad and the band have a gig at the Lemon Tree, a well known Aberdeen venue. It turns out to be a working holiday as a strange corpse (with gills) turns up, and Abigail's talking foxes spot some strange things. Expect giant seagulls, corrupt oil companies, selkies, mermaids, the local police force and some very strange goings-on culminating in danger on board an oil platform in the stormy North Sea. T(I was particularly intrigued because in my muso days, I played a gig at the Lemon Tree, and stayed in Foot Dee (Fitty) which gets regular mentions.) The story was entertaining, but not my favourite Rivers of London book. This is from both Peter's viewpoint and Abigail's as the story diverges and comes back together. I did find Abigail's teen slang a bit wearing, and wonder how that part of the book will age, as slang changes so rapidly. It's good addition to the Rivers of London series, but not the place to start.