Chicken Korma and a pint of Pride

Well it was off to Lords on Sunday with number one son and wife for a spot of Twenty/20 cricket. With Middlesex having won their previous two games there was a smell of renaissance in the air, given they had lost their first seven contests. Things looked good with Sussex needing 26 off the last two overs, but as Chris Nash smashed Chris Silverwood all over the ground Middlesex finished as they started and are bottom of the South and South East group, and destined for second division 20/20 next season.




The trip did, however, allow me to see what developments had taken place at Crockets Folly, a wonderful establishment close to the ground, which had been a regular drinking hole at the test matches for me and many good friends, between the luncheon and tea intervals.

The building was constructed originally by one Frank Crocker, and was to be names the Crown Hotel. Frank knew his development was going to be a success. After all, the new railway terminus was going to be built opposite, how could it fail? Imagine Crocker's despair when the rail terminus was built, half a mile away at Marylebone. Broke and broken, so the tale goes, he threw himself from an upstairs window. The Crown became Crocker's Folly. Frank Crocker was a successful entrepreneur and the Crown a lavish testament to that. He was no newcomer to the pub trade either, having run the Volunteer in Kilburn which must have been successful for him to have the Crown built. The public bar is vast, the billiard room grand, but the jewel-at-the-Crown is the entrance hall saloon.

A late Victorian feast of marble, using fifty different kinds, covering not only the counter, but almost the entire bar. The chimney-piece is marble and has marble columns. Even the walls are lined in marble. All this, beneath a rich plaster relief ceiling.

So Folly or not, the place is now in major disrepair as it clearly struggled to survive on two or three major matches at Lords per year. It was purchased by an Indian takeaway chain who had a view of turning it into a restaurant, but my recent inspection showed leaded windows broken and the front of the property boarded up. It is grade two listed, and there were lights on upstairs, The new owners vans also populated the forecourt. Lets hope, therefore, that some new use can be found for the property before its magnificent interior falls into disrepair.

Honey, I shrunk the kids......

There is a leading edge equine centre on the Wirral, Leahurst, which was recently expanded and had the new facilities opened by HRH The Princess Royal, aka old horse face, herself.

During her visit I was chatting to a veterinary salesman about the merits of using honey for the treatment of scraps and cuts on horses legs.

During the conversation, the merits or otherwise of Manuka honey came up. For those of you not up on honey, Manuka is the health food wonder honey of the 21st century, and at £20 a pot in Sainsbury's it should be.

Like all things with a premium price, however, there is a dark side to it. Apparently there is more Manuka honey, which comes exclusively from New Zealand, sold in Sainsbury's in the UK in a year, than the poor old worker bees in NZ are able to produce. Strange eh!

The honey comes from one of the native trees of New Zealand. The Manuka tree (Leptospermum scoparium) is the New Zealand version of the tea tree plant. It can be found growing wild in much of the country, but more predominately around coastal areas, with the east cape area of the north island having one of the larger concentrations.

The market for blending Manuka with clover or other lower grade honey has caused the regulatory bodies all sorts of headaches ( sadly one thing Manuka will not cure!) so here are some guidelines to allow you to spot the pukka stuff if you so wish:

Proper UMF Active Manuka Honey complies with all 5 of the following criteria for Genuine UMF Manuka Honey as recommended by the Active Manuka Honey Association.

1. It has the name UMF clearly stated on the front label.
2. It is packed into jars and labelled in New Zealand.
3. It is from a New Zealand company licensed to use the name UMF.
4. It has the UMF licensee’s name on the front label.
5. It has a rating of UMF10 or more.

So there you have it and next time you have a tickly cough, or damage a fetlock make sure you get the right jar.

Love is......

Do you remember the box cartoons in the Daily Mail, with the same name, well here's one for you.....

.....when your wife goes from London to Liverpool with both sets of your car keys, but leaves your car in London. Luckily my golf clubs were locked in the boot....humf!!!

CSI Chiswick

Boum! Boum!
Well High Noon met the Shootout at the OK Corral on Saturday night, as a gun fight exploded at the end of Silver Crescent, sending passers by diving for cover, and my Indian takeaway driver unable to get to my door.

It was all quite strange as we heard what appeared to be a series of hammering sounds on the door, then the takeaway man rang to say he could not get down the street. I wandered casually up the road to be confronted by an armed response team and police vehicles everywhere. 'Mind how you go' was all they said as I recovered my evening meal and sauntered back home.

Apparently two men had leaped from a car and chased a third man past the Moran Hotel, shooting him as they went. He then hid in Silver Crescent until they left, before fleeing to Charing Cross Hospital where he was treated for wounds to the arm. There was a fair amount of claret splashed on the pavement so he must have been in some pain.

The two attackers drove off up the North Circular Road, and as yet they remain at large.

All this should see house prices plummet in the area, and just when I thought there might be some positive developments with mine. I had accepted an offer from people in Dubai but their finances seem to have gone pear shaped suddenly, and a couple who saw the place for the third time at the weekend are disagreeing about putting in an offer. She loves it, he is not so keen.....anyway, I will give it to August and if nobody comes in for it, I will take it of the market. There is certainly a shortage of good two bedroomed flats in the area so why move into a hovel for the sake of moving eh?......

The Ballad of Casey Jones

I was in the Colindale newspaper library today doing a bit of research for a decorating project, and in one of the periodicals I was browsing there was the banner headline ' London hit by rail strike, thousands struggle to get home'. The date was 1962. Here we are nearly 50 years on and the same thing is happening today and tomorrow as the tube unions call a 48 hour strike. They seem to be the only group of individuals who regularly disrupt the lives of Londoners these days, and I suspect they do more economic damage that any partial close down forced on us by terrorism or other service interference.

What do they hope to gain? They are clearly not a happy lot or they would have negotiated a stable set of terms the last time they called a strike. This time there is an underlying disciplinary problem which the unions seem keen to force Transport for London to back down on. It is encouraging that they are not, and while joe public is unlikely to know all the ins and outs of the matter, discipline in a service which has so many peoples fate in their hands, needs to be absolutely blemish free. Go get 'em Boris!!

On the way home, as I was sitting at Finchley Road and Frognal station, a goods train rumbled through the station. it was a fairly bland diesel loco pulling an array of similarly bland open topped coal trucks. It made me wonder where all the wonderful customised trucks which used to carry all kinds of produce around the Country have gone. They are probably only preserved in our children's toy train sets, and most of the produce is now transported around the place via the motorway network. Beeching has a thing or two to answer for, and if you are not sure what, here it is in a nutshell......

The effects of the Beeching cuts on the railways over the period 1962-1968 were as follows:-

Staff employed reduced from 500,000 to 300,000
Route miles reduced from 17,000 to 13,000
Number of stations reduced from 5,000 to 2,700
Locomotives reduced from 14,000 to 5,000 (including the changeover from steam to diesel and electric)
Carriages reduced from 36,000 to 20,000
Wagons reduced from 900,000 to 450,000 (including new vehicle types)
Train miles reduced from 335,000,000 to 250,000,000

A True Gentleman

More on the Birkenhead evangelist come cricketer, W P Lockhart. My cousin and I visited the Lords library when we were there for a match last week, and subsequently the librarian has been able to shed some light on Mr Lockharts career.

A brief obituary appeared in Wisden in 1894. It read:
W.P. Lockhart died in the latter part of the summer (12 August 1893). In his time Mr. Lockhart was the best amateur wicket-keeper in the North of England. He was born at Kirkcaldy, N.B., on October 15th 1835. He never appeared at Lord’s, but in 1859 he was one of the Gentlemen’s eleven against the Players at the Oval.

A wizzo site, here, however, details many of the individual games he played including a game against an England side who were about to visit America on tour. He played for Birkenhead Park against Ireland in 1858, and also represented Scotland.

Skype's the limit

I have just purchased a NetBook computer, one of the machines which has a 9" screen, and can just about manage internet browsing and a bit of word processing. I brought the HP model 2133 much to my sister-in-laws disgust, but neither IBM or Lenovo make one close to the spec and price.

It comes with Linux, and I was hoping I would be able to embrace that operating system as a learning exercise, as more and more people seem to want to move from Microsoft and so avoid costs and royalty payments. Its proving more difficult than I thought but i am persevering in some of the slack time which I have at the mo.

Unfortunately though, the HP machine does not support microphone support for Skype, and that was another reason I purchased. Our number two son spend over £200 on phone bills when he was recently in the Dominican Republic. That would have paid for him to have a NetBook with Skype on it.

So I am now trying to sort out dual boot with XP and either SUSE 10 or Ubuntu Net Mix, or maybe all three, and then I will have to sort out a foreign trip to see if the grand plan works.