I know • 21 July 2008 • The SnowBlog
I know
your tolerance for house-moving updates will be as low as my tolerance for house-moving, by now. But you'll be reassured to hear that it's all done and dusted. Literally. Is it just me who has to suffer the Skirting Boards of Shame, on a house move? I mean, I'm hardly the most diligent of housewives, but do people really pull out their wardrobes, cabinets and chests of drawers to hoover behind them? Oh, you do? Oh dear. When we looked around our empty London house, I couldn't believe the state of what's been going on behind our furniture. I blame smoky, smoggy, filth-laden London - not my cleaning habits.
Anyway, filth aside, the two sets of men did their thing (one of them 24 hours late, it should be noted, but never mind) and we now have one empty London house ready for decorating (thanks, Dave!) and one gorgeous country house with the furniture in the right place and - and be impressed here - all the books on the shelves, and all the clothes neatly folded and put away, AND everywhere hoovered and polished and dusted and cleaned to a sparkle. I am quite tired today! I'm not sure if cold viruses live in wardrobes, or dust or something, but Andy and I appear to have acquired one each, plus my hips are jippy, so we feel like physical wrecks today. Still - at least publishing requires you, for the most part, to be sitting down.
In other news: our weekend reading for when we needed a breather has been about bread and grammar. I'm going to badger Andy to do a guest book review for this blog on the book he's reading at the moment - Bread Matters: The State of Modern Bread and a Definitive Guide to Baking Your Own. The only possible conclusion from it is that, due to something called the Chorleywood process which allows manufacturers to make a loaf of bread in a couple of hours, eating shop-bought bread is very bad for your health. The process destroys all the vitamins present in the flour, which manufacturers then have to add back in (and put a nice marketing spin on it - "fortified with Vit C, E and B!"). It was only after this process was introduced in the 1960s that Coeliac's disease was recognised. It makes bread practically indigestible for many people. And we've been eating it now for 50 years. Gulp.
My reading has been Strunk and White's grammar book. I've never read it, because it's American probably, but Andy bought a copy recently and I was intrigued. It's so thin - about 70 pages - but incredibly concise. I find I can't read more than two pages at once before the grammar centres of my brain get overloaded.
So that's our weekend - bread, books and back-breaking homemaking. Hope you had a good one too!
Emma
your tolerance for house-moving updates will be as low as my tolerance for house-moving, by now. But you'll be reassured to hear that it's all done and dusted. Literally. Is it just me who has to suffer the Skirting Boards of Shame, on a house move? I mean, I'm hardly the most diligent of housewives, but do people really pull out their wardrobes, cabinets and chests of drawers to hoover behind them? Oh, you do? Oh dear. When we looked around our empty London house, I couldn't believe the state of what's been going on behind our furniture. I blame smoky, smoggy, filth-laden London - not my cleaning habits.
Anyway, filth aside, the two sets of men did their thing (one of them 24 hours late, it should be noted, but never mind) and we now have one empty London house ready for decorating (thanks, Dave!) and one gorgeous country house with the furniture in the right place and - and be impressed here - all the books on the shelves, and all the clothes neatly folded and put away, AND everywhere hoovered and polished and dusted and cleaned to a sparkle. I am quite tired today! I'm not sure if cold viruses live in wardrobes, or dust or something, but Andy and I appear to have acquired one each, plus my hips are jippy, so we feel like physical wrecks today. Still - at least publishing requires you, for the most part, to be sitting down.
In other news: our weekend reading for when we needed a breather has been about bread and grammar. I'm going to badger Andy to do a guest book review for this blog on the book he's reading at the moment - Bread Matters: The State of Modern Bread and a Definitive Guide to Baking Your Own. The only possible conclusion from it is that, due to something called the Chorleywood process which allows manufacturers to make a loaf of bread in a couple of hours, eating shop-bought bread is very bad for your health. The process destroys all the vitamins present in the flour, which manufacturers then have to add back in (and put a nice marketing spin on it - "fortified with Vit C, E and B!"). It was only after this process was introduced in the 1960s that Coeliac's disease was recognised. It makes bread practically indigestible for many people. And we've been eating it now for 50 years. Gulp.
My reading has been Strunk and White's grammar book. I've never read it, because it's American probably, but Andy bought a copy recently and I was intrigued. It's so thin - about 70 pages - but incredibly concise. I find I can't read more than two pages at once before the grammar centres of my brain get overloaded.
So that's our weekend - bread, books and back-breaking homemaking. Hope you had a good one too!