Tag Archives: value

Cloud with a silver lining

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AFTER A VERY DISAPPOINTING experience at a café we have often enjoyed when staying in Fort Kochi, we went to another eatery, which had been recommended by our friend Sharada S , when we visited Kochi at Christmas in 2019.

Our friend had introduced us to Oceanos. In this pleasant but unpretentious restaurant, we have enjoyed some of the best prepared sea food in Kochi. The dishes served at Oceanos are not only tasty but also authentic, by which I mean that they are not prepared to be ‘fine dining’ fancy; instead they give a good experience of genuine Keralan food.

Currently (February 2023), In addition to an á la carte menu, there is a seafood set lunch – a seafood thali. This included deep fried mackerel; clams (vongole) out of their shells; Aleppey fish curry; roasted prawn curry; sardine steamed in a banana leaf; Malabar paratha; rice; chhaas (buttermilk); and payasam (a local dessert). Every item was exquisitely prepared and tasted very fresh. This wonderful, faultless meal was 390 INR (£3.90) per head. We plan to explore the rest of the menu at Oceanos in the next few days.

Had it not been for the incompetent management at Kashi Art Café today, we would have eaten lunch there. However, as we had not been served our food for almost one our after ordering it, we asked for an explanation of the delay, and were told that there was a problem with the gas in the kitchen. Having been told that we would have our food “in about 10 minutes”, we walked out. If we had been served our food sooner, or been given an explanation without having to ask for one, we might have missed out on the superb lunch at Oceanos.

Breakfast at Shellys in Cheshire

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“BREAKFAST LIKE A KING; lunch like a prince; dinner like a pauper”. This popular saying emphasizes the importance of breakfast amongst the meals partaken during the 24 hours of a day. We spent three nights in Widnes (Cheshire) in July (2022), and wanted to enjoy a decent breakfast. A search of Google revealed that the best-rated place for breakfast was Shelly’s Café located close to Harrison Street, a small road leading off the larger Hale Road.

Shelleys café

There is a sign (for Shellys) with an arrow at the corner of Harrison Street and an unnamed short road with a badly damaged surface. This side road, which is lined on one side by dust-covered parked vehicles, some with flat tyres, leads to a pair of large metal gates, which were closed when we arrived. A key-pad next to the gates allows one to ring Shelley’s. When answered, the gates open slowly. We drove through them into a secure industrial area. This contains several buildings, some of which are warehouses and others factories (including several ice-cream manufacturers). In between the buildings, there are numerous parked cars, vans, and caravans. Most of them are old models covered with a thick layer of dust. We learned that some of them have been standing unused for a year or longer.

Shellys Café is housed in a single-storey wooden shack, adorned with pots of flowers, next to the electrically operated entrance gates. It has large windows and there were chairs and tables outside. The interior is simply decorated with a few wall plaques relating to the joys of riding motorcycles. Two large blackboards list what is on offer. One corner of the building is occupied by a spacious kitchen where Shelley and her husband prepare customers’ orders.  On each of the three mornings we ate at Shellys, we sat beneath a photograph of Marilyn Monroe.  The café had other framed photographs of film stars.

Everything we ordered was delicious. The fried items (including eggs, bacon, black pudding, mushrooms, sausages, hash browns, and tomatoes) were tasty and totally free of grease. What is on offer at Shellys is basic and unpretentious, but well-prepared. Given that this place is rated the best for breakfast in the Widnes area, it is remarkably good value. Were it nearer our home in London, I am sure that we would drive out to eat there, despite the industrial nature of its location.

Carbon dating

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I HAVE JUST DISCOVERED an unopened pack  of ten sheets of 13 x 8 inch carbon paper. Carbon paper is something younger readers might never have heard of or used. For those unused to this product, I will explain. More mature readers must bear with me, please.

CARBON

Carbon paper is a thin sheet of paper, one side of which is loosely coated with particles of ink. The other side of the paper is plain. If carbon paper is placed on plain paper (eg typing or writing paper) so that its inked face is in contact with  the plain paper, and then pressure (e.g. with a stylus or typewriter letter) is applied to a point on its un-inked side, the ink beneath the pressure point is transferred to the plain paper beneath the carbon paper, making a copy of the shape of the object (e.g. letter or shape) creating the pressure. 

Carbon paper was commonly used when typing on a typewriter. The letters that sharply hit  the paper to create a letter, number, or symbol, can be transmitted to a second or third piece of paper by carbon paper. The second and third pieces of typing paper are placed below the top sheet, but  each is separated from the  sheet above by layers of carbon paper with their inked surfaces facing down on them.  Thus, several copies of the same document can be created simultaneously.

This was a useful method of creating up to four reasonably distinct copies of a typed document in the era that preceded photocopiers, laser and inkjet printers, and word processors. For larger numbers of copies, one needed access to something like the now obsolete Gestetner machines. And, the copies they produced were not always easily legible.

The sealed pack of carbon paper that was lurking amongst unsorted stationery in our home  bears the name of the supplier, WH Smith  & Son. The company still exists. It has retail outlets in the UK  and abroad. I have seen branches of the company in the departure lounges of airports in the Gulf States.

The price of our pack is given as “3/-” (three shillings) or “15p”. The UK adopted decimalisation of its currency in 1971. Prior to this change, £1 was 20 shillings, each of which was 12 pennies. Thus £1 was 240 pennies (abbreviated as ‘d’, from the Latin word ‘denarius’).  After the decimalisation,  £1 was divided into 100p (‘pence’).

Given that our unused pack of carbon paper bears a price in both the old and the new currencies, I imagine that it was bought around the time that the British abandoned its old currency, when the new penny, 1p, became worth 2.4d (old pennies).

In 1982, I qualified as a dentist and began tackling the dental problems of the general public. After not having used carbon paper for several years, I found myself using a form of it daily. It came in short narrow rectangular strips of thin paper, sometimes with only one surface loosely coated with ink, but more often both sides. It was/and still is known as ‘articulating paper’. It is used to check how the teeth in the mandible (lower jaw) meet their opposite numbers in the maxilla. Determining this is very important for diagnostic purposes and for checking that crowns, bridges, dentures are in occlusal harmony with the rest of a patient’s dentition. If, for example, a crown (‘cap’) is high on the bite when it is being fitted, articulating paper can be used to detect which part of the cap has excess material that is preventing the patient’s teeth from meeting comfortably.

When I  came across my vintage pack of unused carbon paper, I thought that it was a reminder of times past, but it is not. A quick search on Google revealed that carbon paper is still widely available from stationery suppliers. Rymans now sells ten sheets of A4 carbon paper, not for 15p, but for £5.99. Carbon paper still has many uses apart from typing. For example, sheets of this paper are often used in pads of bills or invoices to make copies of the bills etc handed to customers.

I will not throw away our 3/- pack of carbon paper. It is a souvenir of a historic moment in British monetary evolution and a painful reminder of how much the purchasing power of £1 has diminished in almost 50 years

Fashion Street

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Some years ago our daughter was in Bombay. She rang us and told us that she was pleased that she was staying within walking distance of Fashion Street.

Imagining that Fashion Street was something like London’s Bond Street or the Rue Faubourg St Honoré in Paris, my heart sank hearing this. Was our daughter going to spend all of her money in Fashion Street, I wondered.

Several months later, I visited Bombay and saw Fashion Street for the first time, and then I realised rapidly that I need not have worried. Fashion Street, unlike Bond Street, is a place to get clothes at very reasonable prices.

Hard currency

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currency

Back in 1983, I visited Bulgaria. I had been advised that it was very unwise to exchange currency in the country any other way than by using the state’s official foreign exchange desks. So, as soon as I disembarked at the railway station at Sofia, I changed some of my UK Pounds into Bulgarian Leva. Even at the official exchange rate, one Pound had a more than adequate spending power.

My friend and I took  a taxi to the city centre. When we arrived, the meter , I asked the driver how much we needed to pay. He answered:

“One Deutschmark, One Dollar, One Swiss Franc, or one Pound.”

I said that I wanted to pay in Bulgarian Leva. He said:

“Two Leva”

But, I protested:

“The meter says only one Leva”

The driver turned around and said:

“Two people: two Leva”

I repeat this true tale to emphasise how little local money was valued in comparison with so-called ‘hard currency’. Also, in a few months when the UK leaves the European Union, probably without a trade deal, the Pound, which is already sinking in value, might cease to be a hard currency. Who knows, but here in the UK we might prefer to be paid not in our own currency but in one of the harder currencies such as the US Dollar or the Euro.