As you’ve probably gathered, this house is anything but a “new-build”. It’s got way more character than a identikit modern box on an estate, but the down-side is that much of it is many, many decades old and therefore needs attention. The main foul drain leading to the septic tank is a case in point. […]
I was queuing at the checkouts in Waitrose the other day. Right by the tills, where they generally keep an “impulse purchase” range of cakes and biscuits, was a large box with bunches of daffodils. The woman in front of me in the queue picked one up to add to her trolley. I caught her […]
There was absolutely no hope of a Saturday-morning lie-in today. At ten to nine, three burly men arrived in a van with some long ladders, and have been up on the roof ever since (with regular tea-breaks, naturally!). The noise they make clumping about up there will really give the mice in the loft something […]
When Christopher and I bought this house, over fifteen years ago, we knew that taking on a rather run-down Victorian cottage was going to be something of a “project”. Over the years, we’ve had it rewired, re-decorated, re-carpeted, and extended, yet there is a seemingly endless list of things that need doing. There is always […]
There was a rather amusing article in the local paper recently. One of Malvern’s more avant garde residents had gone to the local theatre box office to ask when the cinema would be showing 50 Shades of Grey. He was told that there were no plans to schedule it because “Malvern isn’t ready for that […]
While I was having my annual bout of Retail Therapy / Recreational Shopping in Stratford the other weekend, I spent an age browsing in the bookshop, coming away with Sense & Sensibility. Note the ampersand – this isn’t the Jane Austen classic, which I’ve known and loved for years. Instead, it’s by Joanna Trollope, Queen […]
When we finally arrived at Larnaca airport, stressed Heathrow-woman dashed off to check in, just in time, whilst the rest of us queued to check in to the BA flight to Gatwick. We were told that it was running 10 minutes late, due to a delayed departure from London. Well, that’s hardly an issue. We […]
When I was away last weekend with my friends at the Pudding Club, they were asking me about my holiday to Cyprus over Christmas. And that made me remember that, although I’d alluded on this blog to the fact that I’d had trouble getting back home, I’d never actually written down the whole story. We […]
There’s been a lot of fuss in the papers recently about Apple becoming the most profitable company ever. There’s so much hype about their products that, if you’ve got an iPhone, you get sweet-talked into upgrading it every year when the next generation product is brought out. After all, what self-respecting tech geek is going […]
I woke up this morning and could tell from the colour of the light coming in through the bedroom curtains that it had snowed overnight. However, I can never tell how bad the situation is until I put my glasses on and open the curtains, as a sprinkling of snow looks just the same to […]
