Anyone who’s read my blog posts will sense an obsession with coffee shops, breakfast and routine. These come together when I’ve got an early start to do the weekly shop at Waitrose.
The routine is simple. Up early (0645) and on the road to beat the traffic on Trumpington Road and then I’m sat down in Waitrose’ coffee shop soon after 0730 with a croissant and coffee and the Guardian to start my day. I’ll forgive the baristas who seem incapable of multi-tasking because generally it works and both the croissant and the coffee are first class.
Last week the system broke down. No plain croissants. Plenty of other pastries including other croissant options but 50% of my essential breakfast missing.
No problem I thought. Why not pop round to the Waitrose in store bakery? Not allowed according to the barista. We just get to accept what they send us. Then OK I’ll go and get one and you can run it through your till. Also not possible because the coffee shop tills have different prices. But he said that I could pay for my croissant at one of the other tills and then he’d sell me the jam and butter to go with it.
Fortunately as I was doing this I came across a gaggle of Waitrose employees including one who was clearly a little senior to the rest. I told him my story and hey presto he sorted it. I guess he just told the barista to charge it as though I’d bought it from the cafe.
But why did it happen this way? Surely croissants are an essential part of a coffee shop’s breakfast offering and if there’s none there the barista should surely be ’empowered’ to go and get some. Simple as that. Famously industrial manufacturing quality systems in Japanese factories allow employees to ‘stop the line’ if there’s a quality defect. No croissants is a quality defect so the barista should have been able to act accordingly.
Anyway full marks in the end but thankfully I wasn’t at a Costa outlet in a Tesco. Costa wouldn’t let you consume a croissant bought in the main store even though it had itself run out. But that’s another story.
My first real camera was a Halina 35X (I had a Kodak Brownie earlier). I inherited it from my father and it was a great camera to start with as I learned the basics of exposure, shutter speed and ISO ratings (although I think we talked more about DIN in those days). 
Lots of competition this month, I seem to have had lots of photographable experiences and taken halfways decent photos of many of them.
Earlier this month the Guardian’s travel supplement ran a feature with ten people remembering their ‘most memorable’ holidays. Here’s my memory of my first independent holiday ‘Four in a Mini to the South of France‘ as featured in my earlier post ‘Five significant holidays’. 
I guess the topic on most people’s radar until yesterday was the heatwave. People compare it to 1976 but I didn’t really experience hat. It was the year I moved from Jakarta to Hong Kong and I just remember a short break mid-summer when I do recall some pretty good weather. 
If I’m anything I’m a creature of habit and that takes me into Cambridge every Saturday morning when I’m at home. We have breakfast with friends and there are often others on the way.
I don’t know how long the Strikes bowling alley has been in Ely or how long it’s been there but it is no more. A week or so Cambridgeshire County Council took it over and is converting it into an archive centre. 