19 April 2014 Pieris Japonica When we moved to our house in April 2007 we were pleasantly surprised to see this very small (80cm) but beautiful tree (it’s actually a shrub… But it can get up to 10m on rare occasions) at the back of our garden. Sadly I’m no…
11/04/2014 Perfection – Perfeição, Legião Urbana Play the song while you read… Renato Russo, my teenage local hero made big (for people who need parallels, think a Brazilian Morrissey, although he was very different from that) wrote most of Legião Urbana’s lyrics. But it turns out it was the one…
26 March 2014 NUT Strike No school for you today, as the NUT is on strike. Concidentally I have the day off, so I went to Oxford Circus to buy some clothes for our upcoming holiday. I spent a couple of hours in Top Shop, that place is overwhelmingly big!…
04 March 2014 Leaky pipe, lucky escape! I was dreaming last night and something really noisy intruded upon it, like a food processor was turned on, or a vacuum cleaner… I woke up, at 2 in the morning, the noise was still there. A really loud electric humming. Well, really…
28 February 2014 New Bathrooms I never got around to adding these to last year’s blog… We had new bathrooms built last October/November. The old coal hole got transformed into a loo/storage room. The old bathroom/w.c. had the wall knocked down and turned into a bigger room – it was…
19 Jan 2014 Tooting Bog Common So, yeah, wettest Winter on record. Lots of flood and misery in the South of England, very sad. We were a bit more fortunate in London, but the Common is really waterlogged, like I’ve never seen it before… I’ve had to run on pavement…
10 October 2012 Olympics 2012: July – Sep The games finally got on the way after years of expectation. They have been and gone and it’s been fun. There was so much controversy surrounding it all, but in the end it was a big success… It started with the Olympic…
31 December 2009 Berlin Day Five – New Year’s Eve New Year’s Eve!!! After very late (or early) night, we slept in. I got Jeff out of bed at 11, in time for breakfast, thankfully it doesn’t finish until 12. We ate – I had a bit of a hangover…
30 December 2009 Berlin Day Four – Zoo & Tresor Woke up today and it was snowing, as predicted, real snow not snow that melts in 5 minutes like in London. We went off to the Zoo, as recommended by Jo and what a treat that was. My favourite day…
29 December 2009 Berlin Day Three Had a lie in today, out of bed by 10:30. Coldest day so far, minus 1 and hardly any visibility. Very eerie. Got the M4 to TV Tower (Alexanderplatz). Walked down Unter Den Linden. Stopped at St. Mary’s, oldest church of medieval Berlin 1294,…