MRI scan

I had an MRI scan on my wrist yesterday, and it's left a bruise.

I kept feeling as though something was touching my wrist, and kept hoping it wasn't me fidgeting [and thus blurring the image] - but I can't have moved about enough to bruise myself.

OK, so it's not an impressive bruise [like the one last week I didn't photograph - I wrote a letter and had a really dark one on the side of my wrist], but it's exactly over where I have the ganglion so I'm feeling a bit weirded out.

I've taken a photo as I don't expect anyone to believe me!

House-hunting update 1

After over five weeks with no hot water [thanks, Helen, hope it happens to you sometime and whoever is in charge of fixing it shows the same sense of "urgency"] in the depths of winter, I can't wait till our house-hunting pays off!

OK, I've owned my own place before, and been without hot water before (and heating in the winter), but the difference is I haven't waited over a month before calling a heating engineer.  I've also raised a complaint with HomeServe because they promise within 24 hour response and were expecting me to wait three days and then pay for the emergency call-out that my cover provided for.  I didn't get the 24 hour response, but my boiler was fixed within 36 hours at no additional charge.

And being a landlord, I've bitten the bullet to pay for emergency call-out fees whereas for myself I could only afford to wait - it's what you do, isn't it?

Anyway, enough of that!


Will and Anita sold the flat at #31 just before Christmas - which was a bit of a shock - they'd been there just over three years, and we're still in "temporary" accommodation.  I think they did what I'd planned to do 24 years ago: buy a first home, trade up within a couple of years, and then buy somewhere bigger.

The difference is, the property market in Brixton is still thriving (it's having it's own little bubble, from what I read) whereas I bought at the peak in 1989 and the market promptly crashed and the flat reduced in value by nearly 30%.  Took ten years till it was valued at the level of the mortgage [and that meant nowhere near as much as I paid, as in those days the 95% or 110% mortgage hadn't been invented (how lucky was that for me?)].  In all the time I couldn't sell, I was still grateful as anything to be able to afford to live in such a lovely home, and (eventually) there was some equity, and that virtually paid for our house in France.

Diversion over.  The market in Kent is still depressed, and vendors still haven't got the memo!  We have seen some absolute dumps and about five properties that would pass the Ann Maurice test.  We visited one home that hasn't been decorated since the 1980's (remember Coloroll?) and in a falling market had magically increased in value price by 27%.  Bizarrely, that place is still for sale [after over a year], and may be joining some of the Zoopla offerings that haven't shifted in over four years, unless the vendors suddenly 'get real' (we've seen one that's been sitting there for since 2008).

I know not everyone wants to decorate before selling or cannot afford to make necessary changes, but that's why the market has two prices: lovely house = top dollar; crappy house = fixer-upper price. What we are seeing is a lot of crappy house = top dollar, and it just doesn't add up!

I don't mind people having all sorts of unrealistic expectations about their homes, but I do mind them wasting our time - offering something for sale at a totally unachievable price wastes everyone's time, but the difference is that estate agents choose to let vendors do that whereas we know there are buyers out there just looking for a right-priced house.  We (well, I) want a fixer-upper, but there's no way we are paying top whack for something that we couldn't sell in a hurry should we need to because we've overpaid by an enormous amount.

We saw one property that if we could have got it for (what even the agent admitted was) a reasonable price, we would be installed in our new home by now.  Sadly, the vendors overpaid three years ago and have spent £65k doing it up [where that money went, there's no visible evidence - we could see about £20,000 worth of work, if you pay the "Everest price" for windows (rather than getting the half-that deal from a smaller firm), but again décor from the 1980's gives the game away that nothing other than that has changed.  And now their asking price seems even more unlikely in the wake of the news that Chilmington Green is going to be the centre of an Ashford new town that will finish [for now, at least] a couple of hundred yards away from the house.

We're now regarding that house as a lucky escape.

I could tell stories like that all day.  We have seen a few places that have sold - a couple were priced exactly right, and in really nice condition, and another one that came down in price by £200,000 over the last two years!

What I would like to offer is some advice to vendors: if you can't afford to decorate, at least go an buy some cleaning products and USE them.

If you can't afford to hit Superdrug or Sainsbury's, sell one of your flat-screen TVs [they go for at least £20 on eBay], and get to a pound shop - bleach, cream cleaner, Flash-alike, scourer, and rubber gloves will set you back £5, and may net you tens of thousands of pounds.  At the very least it will dramatically increase your chances of a sale!

I know starving artists might live in conditions stinking of mold & dog p!ss [I remember a Lucian Freud exhibition that left me with that impression], but there's no need to try and sell a house in that condition unless it's a probate sale and you don't want much money for it.  I'm fully prepared to go in there myself with the rubber gloves [and would welcome a place that needs work], but we won't pay the price for a "done" house if there's a danger that the urine we can smell has rotted/penetrated all the floorboards and we'll have to replace the floor.  Some people, you get the feeling, live like that quite happily [we've seen three houses where the smell made me gag, so we know there are families like that out there], but make an effort, eh?

Oh, and artist [the only reason we know you are an artist is that the agent repeated it several time (as an excuse for the teenager-inspired colour schemes, we think?), so you must have emphasised it enough to them that it 'stuck'] at "April Cottage": air freshener doesn't mask the smell of canine incontinence - it only makes your reception room smell like a portaloo!  And throw out that "doggy" rug!

And while we're at it: why on earth would you build an extension to create a dining room and laundry room and a) only has access to the laundry from outside, and b) place the dining room facing the car park and have the laundry as the only room in the downstairs of the house with a view of the formal garden and the sea?  A tiny bit of thought could have had a dining room off a short hall (with a door to the laundry) from the kitchen and French windows onto the lovely knot garden [and the car park too, if you insist]?  To fix it now would involve moving the French windows, installing a new opening and knocking down and rebuilding the internal walls, so a massive expense that could have been avoided.  Where were your artistic sensitivities?

And why would you block up the old front door, so that the sunny terrace at the front of the house can only be accessed by going out and walking half way round the house, rather than being straight off the reception room?

OK, enough already!

“Ancient history” memories

I’m not incredibly old - 46 - [ok, ok, 47 by Christmas!], but my granddad was Victorian, and many of grandma and granddad’s friends were their age or older, so I think I may be a “lost link”?

Some of the stories I can remember/know:

• My maternal grandmother grew up in a house with servants [her grandfather was the chief constable, so they must have had a good standard, middle class life]; my paternal grandmother was sent over a hundred miles from home into service when she was thirteen.
• A family friend, Gretchen, was tormented horribly at school during the [first/”Great”] war for having a German name.  She told me about walking along West End Lane to get to school when it was a lane.  She remembers farms, fields and cows; by the time I walked along there in the late 1980’s, it had long been a part of fairly-central London.  Hampstead may think it’s a village, but it’s not!  She told me about the chocolate shop on the Finchley Road [Lessiter’s] – about how exciting it all was, having Swiss chocolates that beautiful almost within reach.  I bought her a small box for Christmas one year [the prices seemed to a penniless student to be still eye-watering], and even now I can remember how delighted she was.  A small gesture from me had fulfilled a childhood dream.
• Another friend, Ethel used to deliver milk on a horse-drawn cart.  Her husband Gus cycled to Blackpool and back in a day, and London in one day [about 175 miles].  I know that’s do-able, but think about the roads in the 1920’s and ‘30’s, bicycles with no gears and solid metal frames.  And then imagine doing it with only one arm!  I think that generation was significantly tougher!
• A family friend only last year moved from her family home, into a bungalow, and now for the first time in her life has indoor plumbing.  She can also afford to heat her home, now, so hopefully will have a long and comfortable older age!  I can remember visiting her mother and seeing the range in the kitchen [only source of heat/hot water, but I think they had got an electric cooker by the late 1970’s?], and being fascinated by it as a child.  Having lived in a home with a Rayburn as the heat/hot water/cooker, I know they may look romantic, but unless you have central heating, an immersion heater and a separate oven, it’s not all that much fun!
• Factory shops: I can remember when it was a shop, attached to a factory that sold some “first” quality items, but mostly “seconds” – Potteries-made stacks of dusty plates, but better quality in many instances than the items that make it to “proper” shops today.  Now the “factory” shop is ubiquitous, and full of shiny items of much poorer quality, and almost all of it made in China!  I can remember when production seemed to all move to Portugal [and there was a drop in quality when that happened], but now it all has the made in China back stamp.  There’s nothing wrong with cheap crockery, but I haven’t noticed the prices dropping in line with the quality.  We got a set of Royal Doulton gold-edged china from the Daily Mail [tokens to collect a few years ago], and off all the bigger plates/soup bowls there wasn’t a single “first” quality item, and many wouldn’t once have been sold even as seconds; they would have been in the 10p bin or smashed. 

I feel very lucky – I’m old enough to have seen things done/done things before the modern technological age took over, and have heard stories told by older relatives and friends of the family, but young enough that I’ve seen the world change beyond our imaginations, and the information age is a marvel. 
For instance, I can remember turning hay with a pitchfork, helping dad after Henry Strelau had mown the hay using his “antique” tractor.  I can’t remember if he was a refugee or a prisoner of war, but I remember him being a lovely man, and I loved his little tiny tractor!

The other side of the coin: things that would have taken days of research before can now be Googled in seconds, and I love that trying to re-contact a friend produced an email from Rapanui – she’s travelled there in thousands-of-years’ old technology [Polynesian double-hulled canoes], but contacted me from her iPhone!

I can access music instantly from iTunes or Amazon, but I’m old enough to remember making and receiving compilation tapes for/from friends; trying to get that gap between tracks perfect, and lowering the stylus onto the LP as gently as possible to avoid an audible ‘touch down’.  I know that youngsters today share playlists, but somehow the effortlessness of it seems to make it a bit more soulless; you didn’t spend hours recording a c90 cassette if you didn’t really care for a person – you were giving love as well as songs they may not know!

So, I’m glad I’m old enough to know someone who walked down lanes past cows on farms in Hampstead, and had a granny who was a below stairs maid at 13, and a granddad who was 5 when the “old” queen died, but I’m also appreciative of being able to learn things so much more easily, and have access to long-dead jazz musicians (and bands of the sixties) on YouTube, and send and receive photos in the blink of an eye.  I love my blog; I loved watching cheese mature in caves [Cheddarvision - watch speeded up version here]  I’m glad I’m old enough to remember only having three television channels, and the introduction of Pong as a widely-available computer game, but young enough to be able to watch over sixty TV channels without any trouble, and marvel at the ever-improving wonders of CGI.  [CGI won’t change the memories of the awe I felt when watching Star Wars at the cinema.]

And whilst it was lovely being served in a grocers shop, I’m a real fan of someone delivering my purchases to my door!  [Coincidentally, my mum used to do just that when she worked in her parents’ shop.]

I feel very privileged, and extremely lucky to have arrived on this planet at a time when I could experience a childhood that was pretty laid back [and TV-free!], with toys made by my grandfather and being allowed to visit friends/roam wherever we liked with picnics of jam sandwiches, a tree-house and a garden big enough to run about in…

But also I’ve seen technology outstrip the wildest dreams of many of the science fictions authors I grew up reading; that’s a great time to be alive!

And on that note, it’s probably time to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year; here’s to the future, whilst never forgetting the important parts of the past!

Snippets

[Or even "random thoughts"!]

“Mongoose gene”

According to Rudyard Kipling, the motto of all the mongoose family is “Run and find out”

David has it not!

And I think I've got his share!!

I was re-reading an Agatha Christie story, and one of the characters described another person as having a mongoose instinct for information.  Well, I'm like that if something is different or "off", so whilst I can have my eyelashes dyed, or my hair cut and David won't notice, I can tell if he's used a different shaving oil when he comes home in the evening!

It's a blessing and a curse!

[A "Monk" reference for you.]

Masterchef

We’re watching Masterchef: the Professionals, and it’s bringing back memories of seeing the Australian version in the Summer.  We loved that, the experts seemed [mostly] supportive, with much less criticism than we’ve got used to in the UK programmes.

I think Gregg, Michel and Monica have got less “frowny”/scowly, but the variations introduced Down Under, coupled with the loveliness of their experts/critics makes our home-grown episodes seem a bit stale, or flat, by comparison.  I hope Really TV shows another series [now that digital TV actually seems to work more often that not, we think it’s quite good!  Admittedly it did take some weeks after switchover until we could regularly get anything on the BBC (ironically, the only TV we directly pay for!), but I suspect all the people complaining meant something was done about that.  If only the signal was good enough that the DVR recorded what it says it will...].

We're currently rooting for: Anton, Keri, and Oli...

OK, one of them may have gone home already (we didn't watch last night's episode yet), but we like them all and hope they all go on to fantastic careers.

"Practising yoga is Satanic, it leads to Evil..."

I just came across a newspaper clipping I cut out last year, and I remember thinking I should post about it!

The quote is from Fr Gabriele Amorth who was "the Vatican's chief exorcist and claims to have cleansed hundreds of people of evil spirits" according to the Daily Telegraph [Saturday, November 26, 2011].

Apparently, he is echoing the sentiments of the Pope whilst he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger...

My second thought was: "let him who is without sin cast the first stone". [John 8:7]

Or if you prefer: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" [Matthew 7:3]

Or even: "judge not, that ye be not judged." [Matthew 7:1]

I could go on in that vein for a long time, and I don't even have my bible with me!  The first thought I had was: well, that conveniently moves the focus away from the scandals attaching to the [alleged] abuse by priests of children that seems to have been covered up by parishes around the globe for decades...

According to the Telegraph, again, he 'claimed that Catholic sex abuse scandals are proof that Satan is waging a war against the Holy See'.  Well, that's OK then, isn't it?

Hmmm!  Sadly, I don't find his case persuasive enough to forego my weekly yoga class and whatever practice I can fit in at home...  Although my left hip is hurting after yesterday's three-legged-dog, so maybe he's not wrong?

And finally:

Is an ugly person actually allowed to practise medicine in Seattle?

[Grey's Anatomy re-runs!]

Exchanges with People that Make Your Brain Hurt

OK, so I lifted the title of this post from an EtiquetteHell forum, but it sums it up pretty exactly what happened when we saw a friend recently.

We were discussing non-alcoholic drinks, as she said she can no longer stand the taste of alcohol, and so no longer drinks…

I said I’m perfectly OK when we go to other people’s houses to have water or fruit juice (but don’t expect juice to be offered, and really am fine with tap water), and she said she couldn’t stand fruit juice [I really can’t convey the level of disdain she attached to something that ‘disgusting’…  Mind, she happily drinks Coke, so our taste buds must be fairly different!], so I said I’m fine with just water.

And she said she was talking about at home, so I started telling her about Rice Dream – my favourite “treat” drink: hazelnut & almond-flavoured rice “milk”.  So then she said she couldn’t expect people to provide that for her [I know; I don’t expect that to happen, but we were talking about what to drink in our own homes], so that’s why she drinks Crabbie’s Alcoholic Ginger Beer [that she brings with her].

I think it was at that point that my brain broke, and I realised that whatever I said was going to be wrong, so I got up to get myself another glass of delicious [and easily available] tap water, as she reached in her bag for her “non-alcoholic” alternative to expecting people to provide something she could drink.

[In case anyone hasn’t seen all the advertisements on television for Crabbie’s Alcoholic Ginger Beer, it’s basically an alcoholic version of ginger ale (a non-alcoholic mixer, more common in pubs that domestic settings, which way back in the mists of time used to contain alcohol), so a slightly fiery tasting alcopop.]

She did offer me some, but I re-iterated that I’m not drinking alcohol…

I’m still not sure how something like a strong lager (4%) in bigger bottles counts as non-alcoholic, but I’m glad we weren’t venturing onto the roads that night…

Another incident happened at a party – I had to refuse one friend’s offer of dessert wine a couple of times, and then port about four or five times.  I have to admit, the last time I said “I don’t want any alcohol, I’m driving” I got a bit tetchy and emphatic, but seriously how awful am I that I don’t want to get behind the wheel of a car when I’ve had a drink?

I know I offended the second friend [I could tell from her face], and she and her husband went really soon after that, but I hadn’t realised her hubby was driving.  So glad we left after them!

When we got to the car & I spent about five minutes scraping off the ice from the windows whilst the engine warmed up I was really happy to have all my wits about me…

Even more so when we passed the police vehicle stopped at the end of the lane!

I don’t think I’m a party-pooper, but I’m really not happy at being repeatedly pressed to drink alcohol, especially when I’m driving.

Rare sighting of sunlight at our house!

We so rarely get sun into the living room at our house in Maidstone that I took a photograph!

Sometimes in summer we get sun crossing the table in the opposite direction between 7-8pm, but haven't seen that for a while, so am very happy to see the occasion beam that makes it in now.

Cake update

Cake...

The cake was absolutely fine [still is, it's lasting longer than expected!] - it's really moist, but is properly cooked, and neither David nor I think it tastes particularly sugar-free or gluten-free.

It's actually nicer than the last cake we had at a tea-room, so that's a real plus; I worry that not having sugar/being wheat/gluten-free will make it not as good as "proper" cake, but when it tastes better, that's a huge boost to the self-confidence...

The banana comes through nicely in the flavour, and the level of sweetness; not a sweet cake like some, but perfectly OK.  I think it's made it a bit heavier, doubling the quantity of banana, but it's still not as dense as banana bread can be.

Adding the extra dried fruit makes a difference too, and it being moist elevates it above a lot of fruit cakes (even those sold commercially), so I'm happy with the results.

I still worry that the use of gluten-free flour is making it more solid than a traditional cake, but then a fruit cake can often be quite heavy.

All round, I'll accept the recipe for now, and as each slice only contains about a quarter of a banana and roughly a quarter of a handful of sultanas/cranberries, it means I get a "hit" of sweet stuff without eating anything sweetened; result!