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Last weekend we had roast beef with most of the trimmings (there's always room for more trimmings). I made the yorkshire puddings myself with a recipe from a Gary Rhodes book. And they turned out just perfectly if you ask me. Though they do look a bit like horse's hooves.
We had a particular space to fill next to the sofa in our new house, and wanted a low sideboard to house our extensive and exotic booze collection, which up until now has been gathering dust on the floor in a corner. However the space is only 82cm wide and most pieces of suitable furniture we've seen are at least a metre wide, and often too tall compared to the 69cm high sofa.
We set off on Saturday with a medium length list of places to try in our grim search for just the right solution, but we struck lucky at our first stop: Emmaus in St Albans. This place is basically a second hand furniture shop with fairly rapid turnover, but it's more than just that, being run as a community to get homeless people back on their feet. We've been a couple of times before and not found anything for us, but this time round for just £10 we came away with an 84 cm wide cupboard that sits just perfectly in our previously empty space.
Isn't that 2cm too wide you may ask? Yes, so I had to remove the beading at the edge of the laminate floor to make enough room for a very snug fit.
Our collection of exotic and nauseous booze will now reside within, perhaps lying undisturbed for decades until young teenagers nick it late at night. And so the cycle repeats.
I went exploring on Hampstead Heath over lunchtime the other day, looking for wild things to photograph (see UKNatureBlog for the results). From the top of Parliament Hill I took this photograph looking back towards Canary Wharf and my work office in the nearer foreground. Click for bigger version.
I'm afraid that the nature posts are going to dry up here, but never fear for they're all now going to be on UKNatureBlog.com - a new blog specifically for the flora and fauna of the UK and all related things, setup by myself and Mrs C.
Go and have a look, bookmark it, and do please contribute. The cheeky chap below will be over there from now on.
One of the sheds I inherited when I moved into the new house had a bit of a dodgy roof, with the felt rather ragged and exposing the wood around the edges. In the recent strong winds half of the felt actually peeled back and flopped to one side like a bad combover, so with lots of rain forecast for this week I figured I had to act swiftly to keep things dry.
According to their website Homebase don't actually sell roof felt (though they do sell the nails) so it was Wickes that sorted me out: £11 for an 8 metre roll of felt and a couple of quid more for a ridiculous quantity of 'galvanised 13mm extra large head clout nails'. A bargain surely.
It turned out to be surprisingly straightforward to get the old felt off and the new stuff on, even with no access to the side and rear aspects. I was done within just a couple of hours. I had to do most of the work from perching on the roof itself, which was only just robust enough to support me. The special nails are a joy to work with: push them into the felt with a thumb and they stand up on their own, then two whacks with a hammer and they're in. Very satisfying.
The only thing that went wrong was a misdirected hammer blow when leant over the rear, fighting amongst tree branches, which ripped a hole in the felt. I was nearly done at this point so wasn't keen to rip it all off and start again, but luckily the tarry felt could be pudged back together with a thumb in such a way that it's probably sufficiently waterproof. I'll have to keep an eye on that. It was also tough not to damage the felt when climbing all over it, which explains the scuff marks in the photo below.