Category
House & Home
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07.17.02Calling for youAnother strange call last night at midnight. I missed it again, and called back and got a disembodied female voice saying simply the words "Alpha Telecom", and then a long disconnection beep.Phone weirdness abounds. ET, are you trying to get in touch?Confession: I've never seen ET. Or Gone With The Wind. Or Casablanca.
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07.15.02On dusting, and other domestic dilemmasYesterday we flung open all the windows and gave the house a proper spring (well, summer) clean. Dull but necessary once in a while. It's so easy to depend on maintenance cleaning and tidying; picking up as you go along and keeping the place relatively ordered and hygienic, but rarely getting around to hoovering the top of the doorframe. You know the kind of tasks I mean. I have a friend who swears by having a "woman who does" - someone to come over a couple of times a week and hoover, scrub the shower, clean the oven and dust everything. ...
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07.11.02Lewk upLying on the sofa and watching the sky through enormous windows, one side of the sky was dark and ominously cloudy, the other side bathed in fiery evening light. One storm cloud looked as if it was about to burst with brilliance.
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06.26.02When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar.We slept with the door open last night.It was so stuffy in the flat that we left the bedroom door open, along with the window, and the fan created a cooling breeze.But that was not the only thing left open.Earlier in the evening, when the Sainsbury's order arrived, I had run down four flights of stairs to collect the grocieries, putting the door to the flat on the latch. P arrived home with takeaway at the same time as the groceries, and there was a policeman on the doorstep, and we had to lug everything upstairs and things all got ...
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06.21.02We live under the flightpathWe live under the flightpath into Heathrow, and sometimes the planes are very low and loud as they circle over London on their final approach. This is a good thing if you're in one - as I have been a few times recently - because it means you can peer out of the window and spot our street, which is always mildly exciting - I love seeing something familiar from a totally different perspective (which is why I've been completely lusting after this book (and this one) since it came out last year.It's also curiously relaxing to lie on the ...
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05.23.02DisturbiaI'm sitting in the living room, and the noisy bastard from across the street has some friends over and is cranking some dub up load.It gives me enormous pleasure to get up from the computer, switch it off, turn off the light and close the door on his racket. This is no longer my bedroom. Goodnight Mr Loud - your nocturnal noise cannot harm me any more.But I still sincerely hope your ears fall off.
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05.16.02You’ve got to love builders.After spending much of the end of last week erecting scaffolding outside the back of our house, they've now discovered that they can't actually open the window to shout instructions from inside the bathroom to outside, because the scaffolding is flush against the window frame. Brilliant. Cue much running up and down stairs like loonies, and many out-of-puff plumbers.So here I am, waiting for the builders, or possibly plumbers, to finish and the loss adjuster to turn up all of whom were reputed to show up at about twenty past eleven. But the builder arrived at quarter to ten, and ...
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05.14.02SoakTo say we got caught in the rain last night would be to understate the situation just slightly. It had been drizzling all day and then, on our way back from a post-work (I nearly said post-office, but that would be something else entirely) trip to the supermarket, the skies opened dramatically, soaking us from head to toe, leaving us sodden and streaming with London rain, and splashes thrown up by puddles on the busy Talgarth Road as we squelched home with bags of groceries.How wonderful, then, to be able to get into a flat that is utterly our own, ...
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05.13.02All ChangeWe moved house yesterday - quite literally. When we first moved into our lovely flat, we took one look at the large room with enormous windows at the front of the house and said "oh yes, that'll be the bedroom, thankyewverymuch" leaving the middle room (which has two doors - one to the hallway, by the main entrance, and a door to the West Wing, with stairs to the spare room/study and bathroom) to be the living room. Besides, why would anyone put a bedroom in the middle of the house? Anyone who came to stay or for dinner would ...
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05.10.02Mr WolfThere is a big welsh man who lives (or is staying) in a flat across the road from us, but who I've never seen before (odd, because this street full of houses converted into flats with big Georgian windows is perfect for people watching - remind me to tell you sometime about the kiwi commune directly across from our kitchen window - hundreds of faces and never the same person twice, plus barbeques every weekend). For the second night in a row, at almost exactly the same time of night, he's leaning out of his second floor window, shouting down ...
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