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Making the most of my TOIL

The acronym for Time Off In Lieu is highly appropriate – one only manages to accrue it when one’s been toiling away. And, as Sam pointed out in a comment yesterday, I’ve certainly been building up a fair amount of extra hours throughout January. In fact, for the last two weeks I’ve done a full [...]

Sorting out the kitchen

While Chris was in partial remission, in late Spring 2010,  we accepted a quote from Rob for decorating the kitchen and dining room and re-tiling the bathroom. The earliest he could fit us in was September, but by then Chris was already dead. I simply couldn’t face the disruption of having the kitchen out of [...]

The neglected kitchen

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to get the kitchen redecorated. We moved in to this house over 14 years ago, and the first thing we did was to get it re-wired throughout. That made a right mess, which meant that the whole house needed to be redecorated. But we couldn’t afford to do [...]

Mystery solved – it was the District Nurse

No, not in the Library with the Lead Piping, but rather skewing the search results for my blog. My sister did a bit of investigation following my recent post, and indeed her colleague’s husband has been telling people about how to get a comfortable post-operative night’s sleep using an old-fashioned method of arranging pillows he [...]

Peeking behind the statistics

When Chris set up this blog he subscribed to Google Analytics, which allowed him to see some basic statistics about how the blog is viewed. Not at the level of individual people – everything is totally anonymous unless you choose to send a comment – but aggregations and top-level statistics. I can’t actually make use [...]

Cross with myself

It was back to work this week, after two very interesting and rather eventful weeks off over Christmas and New Year. Monday was a Bank Holiday, but I was up bright and early on Tuesday morning ready for work. Not because of any New Years resolutions about getting into work earlier – more a case [...]

More trees devouring temples

Several friends have commented about how interesting they found the picture of the tree roots devouring the temple at Ta Prohm. So here are a few more pictures of that temple, and the neighbouring Banteay Kdei, both being assailed by jungle. You can see the damage that the tree roots are doing – the walls [...]

New Year – taking stock

I wrote in several of my Christmas cards that I had survived another year. One of my friends (hello Lucy!) called me up on that, saying that it looks from this blog as though I’ve more than survived. Well, perhaps she’s right. It’s difficult when one is concentrating on putting one foot in front of [...]

Pomegranate Lamb

I’ve had some requests for the recipe for pomegranate lamb, which I cooked before Christmas. Now that I’m back home, and within reach of my cookbooks, here it is. The recipe is taken from The Book of North African Cooking by Lesley Mackley which seems to be out of print but available secondhand from Amazon [...]

Scattering the ashes part 3

One of the reasons for going to Cambodia was to scatter some of Christopher’s ashes at or near Angkor Wat – somewhere that had very firmly been on our list of places to visit. All through the holiday I kept thinking about how much Christopher would have loved it – he would have so enjoyed [...]