You and Yours has mentioned the above APPG, so I googled to see if I could find anything about it.
First hit is Stockton’s MP Dari Taylor (who seems to have a huge amount of APPGs in her biography – how does she have time?)
She says she dances with the Division Belles. Ho, ho, ho.
Iain Dale is speaking at a dinner and is asking for jokes again. (It’s over a year since the last time he asked!) Here’ my current favourite that came in on e-mail, ooh, last night.
Council tax
Council tax re-valuers want to charge us more if we live in a nice area.
That ought to mean discounts for those of us who live in rough areas.We have a huge council house in our street. The extended family is run by a grumpy old woman with a pack of fierce dogs.
Her car isn’t taxed or insured, and doesn’t even have a number plate, but the police still do not do anything.
Her bad tempered old man is famous for upsetting foreigners with racist comments.
A local shopkeeper blames him for ordering the murder of his son’s girlfriend but nothing has been proved yet.
All their kids have broken marriages except the youngest, who everyone thought was gay.
Two grandsons are meant to be in the Army but are always seen out in nightclubs.
The family’s odd antics are always in the papers.
They are out of control.
Who’d want to live near Windsor Castle?
I’m just listening to Phone Ming on Radio 4. Slightly odd. Soft lobs from the presenter so far… what will the callers ask?
Will they cover the Saudi Arabia Al Yamamah scandal?
Art Deco Lift Lamps. On the ground floor, there are two lamps, one on each side of the building. Under the lamps are orange LEDs. These indicate whether the lift in that side is waiting at ground floor level – so you can always turn the right way first time.
Tea trays. Tea in the Council House is served in silver tea and coffee pots bearing the city’s crest. There are matching sugar pots and milk jugs. The tall pot has coffee in it and the smaller one is tea.
Walnut panelled auto-door. The Dining Room on the first floor has a door with an unusual wooden electric sliding door. You control it with a key from the inside. If you’re locked out, you can get into the room from the ballroom or from the kitchen. Or even from the fire exit opposite the gents’ loos.
The light switch for the tea room is in the telephone cubicle just outside.
There used to be a bearskin rug in the members’ room with a real bear head on and everything. But someone complained and it was removed to storage.
Ghandi bust. There’s a larger-than-life bust of Ghandi under the staircase on the first floor, near the matchstick model of the building.
How the building was paid for: Nottingham’s Council House was paid for slowly out of the rents of the shopping arcade at the back of it. The cost was met in the mid-80s, fifty years after the building opened.
The Lord Mayor has a bath in his office. So does the Sheriff of Nottingham and the Deputy Lord Mayor. The rest of us have to share one shower cubicle in the basement.
The tram stops them cleaning the windows. They can’t clean the windows on one side of the building because the overhead power wires make it too dangerous to put a ladder or a cherry picker up.
Bricks showing through. There’s a portion of wall in a stair well where the plaster is damaged and you can see the bricks showing through. They’re a strange shape compared to modern bricks.
It’s a great building to work in. I’ll take my camera in one day this week and take a few more pictures. In the meantime here’s a few I took earlier.
I didn’t log-in to Abel&Cole early enough this week to tell them I didn’t want what was going in my veg box.
So, we have MORE CARROTS. Carrots come every week. We haven’t yet eaten them all in any given week. I am mostly grating them and eating them raw, either as plain grated carrot, or as coleslaw, or as a carrot salad with cheese, pine nuts and raisins. Coleslaw is dead easy to make by hand for just two – just pushing blocks of cabbage and carrot through a hand grater and adding commercial mayo. It would be more of a pain to make in larger numbers. Have a vague idea to try it with fennel instead of cabbage next time I have that in the box. An unfortunate side effect, however, is that the kitchen is a little bit spattered with renegade carrot shards.
We have BROAD BEANS which I don’t like at all.
And we have THE WRONG KIND OF MANGO. Not the lovely juicy bright orange ones that fall off the stone and are only available at certain times of year, but the rock hard green and red ones such as you see at a supermarket. The sort that never seems to ripen, and I have no idea what to do with. I don’t think you can even make hedgehogs with them!
Nottingham’s been on the telly a lot recently – or at least it’s been on ours! Two fictional characters in two days have said they’re from Nottingham.
First John Smith, the human that Dr Who turns into in the most recent episode, said he was from “a house in Broadmarsh,” but for plot reasons couldn’t remember a great deal about it.
Then last night, we watched V for Vendetta – a bleak vision of a totalitarian future for a Britain kept on its knees in fear of terrorism, where the government bans free protest, locks up and tortures its own citizens, routinely spies on them, and prevents them from criticising the authorities. In it, there was a lesbian character who found herself removed from her flat, locked away in a prison, has her hair shaved off, and is eventually murdered. She was from a “a farm in Nottingham, Tottlebrook,” which made us both double-take a little.
Incidentally, I’ve started using Flixster on Facebook to record movies seen, ratings and reviews. It seems really good – and will be even better when they sort out their engine properly to merge “Flixster-on-Facebook” with their main website http://www.flixster.com so that we can have the full functionality without having to be on Facebook.
We have elderflowers growing in the garden – I recognised the elderberries at the back end of last season, and thought I should look out for the flowers. I see them every (ahem) morning when I open the bedroom curtains – they’re the white specs in the middle of this photo.
Seeing that Manda had made elderflower champagne – she’s written about it here, and has a recipe here. At first I thought that elderflower champagne was going to be a little complicated, what with finding suitable bottles, so resolved to make elderflower cordial instead, following this recipe.
The recipe sent me to Wilcos in search of citric acid, from their ever-smaller homebrew shelves, but while I was there, I saw they had a machine for putting crown caps on bottles. I’d assumed it would be complicated and expensive, but i fact it was under a fiver. Now the only thing standing in the way of making elderflower champagne is empty beer bottles, and I’m sure I’ll be able to manage to make some of those.
Home again to boil water, make sugar syrup, peel lemons, etc.
The mix is steeping for 24 hours now, but already tastes fantastic. If you have seen any elderflowers growing anywhere near you, I urge you go and make this! It’s dead simple and tastes gorgeous. And so cheap compared to commercial elderflower cordials.
Now off to sterilize a bucket to make champagne too!
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