Now I understand why there was gridlock on the road into town this morning.
It was absolutely chocka with the market researchers, Big Issue salesmen, charity collectors, Santas-with-buckets who went on to pester the already-hassled shoppers in the city centre.
Not content with interrupting the flow of traffic on the roads, they have also to interrupt the flow of shoppers in the pedestrianised town centre.
I think I have now discharged my Christmas shopping duties.
American States, Romania and Quangos.
I got 9/10 for the American States, tripping up only on the name of the Kennedy who was a New York state senator; but scored only 4/10 on each of the Romania and Quango quizes.
Traffic in Nottingham is usually pretty good – transport is one Council responsibility that works really well in the City.
But this morning, something was afoot, and the Mansfield Road, which is the arterial road from my house to the city centre, was jam packed at 9.30. It’s usually pretty hairy from about 8am to 9am, but calms down rapidly after 9am. So for committee meetings at 10am, I can be pretty certain that leaving the house at 9.25am will let me catch a bus and get to the city centre in plenty of time.
Not this morning. As soon as I got onto the Mansfield Road, I could see there was a problem – traffic in the inbound direction was at a standstill throughout the Sherwood shops. There were three buses at the stop unable to move because there was nowhere to go. I could see as far as the brow of the first hill, so I thought I’d walk as far as that to see if I could see what the problem was.
Once I got there, there was no end in sight to the traffic queue, and I was already much ahead of the bus I would have been sitting on, so I decided to carry on on foot into town.
It’s not nearly as far as I thought it was! I have just checked on Google Maps, and door to door, it’s just over two miles. I thought it was closer to three. In fact it only takes about thirty minutes to walk – about what the Government thinks everyone should walk every day. The bus normally takes at least 15 minutes, and if you factor in the waiting time too, it might even be quicker to walk!
This morning, I squandered the health advantage of walking in with a McBreakfast, but in the future, I will be better. Who knows, one day I might be thin!
Last night, on leaving the office, (as opposed to driving to it) the road outside was blocked by a vast lorry.
Looking around a little there was a thin man with bad hair and teeth and a stripey jumper thrusting an envelope under the nose of anyone who’d listen.
I let myself be accosted. He was looking for an address. When I saw that the ‘sender’ column was in Germany, I jokingly asked if he’d driven from there. He had! So I switched to German.
It didn’t go quite as well as the last time I tried, or the time before but we did still manage to communicate. He’d made it as far as Chesterfield with no map of England whatsoever, but once he’d got here he had no chance of finding the address he was looking for at all.
In the circs, I didn’t mind going back into the office and looking up the address for him.
He told me his next stop was Austria!
Yesterday, I was in blissful ignorance as to what Molton Brown could be. Then it was requested as a Christmas present and I have today been on a voyage of discovery.
First, I found it was unctions of various different flavours.
Later this afternoon, I ascertained that it cannot be procured in Boots, and finally got around to googling it.
It’s unctions that have their own boutiques or outlets in the high end department stores like John Lewis and House of Fraser.
Nottingham is one of the fortunate few towns to qualify for its own boutique, and it happens to be around the corner from the Council House, so around the corner I duly went.
It’s one of those stores that has largely empty shelves, with a few delicately placed, uplit bottles stategically surrounded by expensive-looking wood. There are price tags, but you have to hunt.
Some of their range includes hand wash and moisturizer perfumed with unpronounceable and unheard of botanicals. And if you’ve ever been to Lib Dem conference, they’ll be familiar. I’m pretty sure that the bottles of fancy handwash in the gents of the Hilton Brighton Metropole are Molton Brown.
Presumably, they don’t pay the £14 a bottle the Nottingham store fleeced me for.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that money buys you something. But not sodium stearate in a bottle.
Whilst I was queueing to hand over my cash, I was struck by the quality of the staff. In particular the blond man with the biceps, the expensive hair do and the nose – which could only be described as ‘aqualine.’ Long, pointy, delicate.
Then my focus widened. The other staff members, all women, had exactly the same nose. I was on the verge of asking if they were related, because their faces were similar, but then it occured to me that good bone structure is probably a job requirement for working there.
They were excessively curteous, boxed my purchases, apologised profusely for the delay (one of their tills was out of action). They’d clearly had a rough day selling fancy soap to posh people and explaining what naran ji is. (“distilled from the delicate white blossoms of Moroccan orange trees”)
I asked them how long the store had been open, and they told me nearly two years. That’s two years where I’ve walked past it a couple of times a week and never spotted it once. It’s a prime location just off Bridlesmithgate, which has some of the poshest shops in the City.
My two bottles of lotion were wrapped, boxed, and tied up with ribbon. Then that box was put into a heavy paper bag with fancy handles and tied up with another ribbon. Which leads to a further dilemma – how much of what I carried out of the store do I give as a gift? Does it come out of the bag? I clearly paid for that as well, so does it count as part of the present? Do I wrap the whole lot and leave it as layers so that the recipient can unwrap it very slowly? – it cost so much they’re not getting anything else!
I thought EBU just did Eurovision, and that was that, but yesterday, driving to Chesterfield for an evening session, I was forced onto Radio 3 by “Poetry? Puhlease!” on Radio 4 and heard a wonderful concert from the BBC Singers.
There were a number of unaccompanied carols, all of them the sorts of things that even good choirs struggle to stay in tune for.
The theme was English and French carols, and many of them were in French, sung with good French accents too. Well done, BBC Singers.
The session ended up with a glorious, chaotic arrangement of Ding Dong Merrily on High with the Glorias going all over the place and changing key randomly.
The EBU link? This was apparently part of the annual EBU Day of Christmas Music – a 7 hour long marathon of concerts from Moscow, Karlsruhe (Nottingham’s twin town), Québécois Laval (? European?) and Chrudim in the Czech Republic, as well as the London concert.
It’s available on the BBC’s “Listen Again” under the link above – but only as one link for the whole 7 hours!
The kitchen fitter finished just before 9pm this evening.
We now have more fridge than we’ve ever had, our first ever dishwasher, an oven with a timer, and a built in hob – no more pasta and veg falling down the side of the cooker!
Space Kitchens have now done all they’re going to do. The units, worktops, cupboards and appliances are all fitted and they work.
Over to us to do the rest. We have to decorate and put up shelves up, mask some of the less than ideal bits of kitchen which are left.
We have slightly fewer cupboards than before, so I now have to figure out what kitchen stuff I’m keeping and what not. I was effectively the last one out of several shared houses, so I’ve got all sorts of leftover bits and pieces that no-one else took – baking trays, cutlery, and the like. I have loads of things like spatulas and fish slices and so on. Time to rationalise. Maybe even time to discard all the old ones and invest in a new set that match.
As well as putting up shelves, I’m interested in space-saving kitchen ideas too. My saucepans are all pretty dreadful – I inherited a decade-old set of matching non-stick pans when I left home 10 years ago, which have served me pretty well until now. Over the last year, I knackered the largest by leaving it on an electric hob and burning something into the base so badly I couldn’t clean it. A little later, and the handle just fell off the smallest. So I really only have one pan left. My new set are going to be dishwasher-proof and probably will hang on the wall.
I am looking forward to using the oven with the timer. You can set the time you want the oven to finish, and the length of cooking time, and it works out the start time. So no more “Christmas dinner at 5pm” misery – I can set the bird to come on automatically in the middle of the night and not have to get up at the crack of dawn to turn the oven on!
This year’s round robin is unusually terse. But I’ve got to get these cards in the post!
Here’s a downloadable copy for those of you not on my Christmas card list!
The Flickr links for the photos are: Windsor Cat Snow House “We Want to Go Out!” and Garden from Upstairs Window
We bought a house we moved into last Christmas. The renovations continue. New kitchen going in right now!
House has a big, odd-shaped, established garden – we haven’t quite got on top of maintaining it fully yet.
Smudge (l) and Fudge joined our household in May, and have been reasonably well behaved since.
This is the best pic I’ve taken this year. It’s one of the cats living in Windsor Castle, where I spent my hols singing.
Why not blog four pictures that tell the story of your year?
Look at how smoothly the new kitchen drawers work!
With thanks to my glamorous assistant.
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