Another weekend, another new skill...

Well, it's been a busy weekend. Decided that some of our floorboards really needed some attention - that much sagging couldn't be healthy...

So the day started with a trip to Howarth Timber and Building Merchants, a cornerstone of probably one of the worst traffic complexes in all of London - Brockley Cross. You wouldn't have thought that much chaos could be engineered in such a small space. And yet..

Anyway, Howarth's was one of the slightly more intimidating hardware stores I've been to. Not often you have to ask if somewhere does actually do Retail! But for all that, they were really friendly and helpful and now if ever I need wood or anything at all to do with fitting or shaping or otherwise messing with wood I will know where to go. I think we must have seemed such rookies - the newbie DIY kids with no clue what do do...

Getting back to the house, sure enough it was an unholy mess underneath the sagging floorboards, with some of them resting on live electricity cables. Nice.

Bit of shaping, hammering, sawing later, it started to look pretty good.

I have two books to thank for this little feat. One a book my Dad gave me from back when he was doing something similar to a house from a similar era - an early 1980s Readers Digest 'Looking after your (you may as well add 'Victorian' here) Home' which is ace - all the basics including stuff that you don't even have to do anymore, like make your own rawlplugs out of wooden dowel... And another - The Victorian House manual. Which is by Haynes, they of the VW combi maintenance guide fame. Brill. But they make everthing sound like armageddon and what do you think you've done buying a Victorian property...

All things considered though, enjoying my foray into flooring techniques...

The wolf and the lamb will feed together....

We have two cats. One of the them, Arlo, is very fond of running about outside in the garden. This gets a little embarrassing sometimes as his idea of territory doesn't always coincide with convenient human notions of fences and boundaries and so on. In short, his 'territory' seems to consist of about 6 gardens, and if any other cat has the misfortune of being in one of them, they are assailed with the most aggressive wail/miaow I've ever heard... I don't know if our neighbours read this blog. If they do, I'm sorry....

Anyway, one thing that has always worried us is: what would happen if Arlo ever met a fox. There are a lot of foxes in Brockley, even during the day. Long story short, on Saturday, our local fox was sunbathing and washing up on the roof of the shed. So was Arlo. Not a murmur of complaint or warning from Arlo, not a flicker of acknowledgement from the fox.

So it seems cats and foxes can coexist just fine. Not sure if that's what the writer of the title of the blog quite had in mind, but there you go...

Alien Vegetables

Kohlrabi. Now there’s a vegetable you don’t see much of over here…. So much so that when it comes in Abel & Cole’s excellent veg box it really looks like an alien planted there to scare people. Even the mighty Nigel Slater seems to shie away – his excellent Tender part one doesn’t even mention the poor thing.

But receiving curious looking vegetables is a good excuse to go recipe-hunting. Good find today was the excellent Veg Box Recipes which yields receipes even for the forlorn Kohlrabi! Just peel, cut into 1/4 inch slices, mix with olive oil and a clove of garlic, and roast for about 20 minutes, then garnish with Parmesan. And there you have it. With stuffed chicken breasts from Drings (I'm sure I've posted about our favourite butcher before..) and roast potatatoes, it all works rather well:


Turns out, by the way, that Kohlrabi is very popular in Germany. We have much to learn...

1882

Thought it was about time I commented on a coffee shop that's opened up near my office. Caffe Vergnano 1882. It's actually been there over a year now, but has kind of achieved critical mass with my colleagues, who all universally love it.
And with good cause - it's fabulous. A wee bit expensive, ok, but such a great experience. Bottom line: the coffee is so good, lovingly produced by extremely professional and discreet baristas on an amazing machine, and then presented beautifully:

It's a great place to come and chat, think about stuff, sidestep a little. I've had a little look at their website too, and it does all the good stuff that a decent brand should do nowadays, which basically is total focus on the core thing that they do well, and a great customer experience.

Only question in my mind is: why 1882 in the name? It might be something simple like the first cafe they opened, but it might be something more significant going back into European history with the coffee shops in Paris pre the French Revolution, the barricades.... but then the date is a lot later than all that... The Franco-Prussian War was in 1870-71.. Oh, I don't know. Does anyone else??

On Simon Schama and Lawnmowers

An interesting coincidence this week. I've been getting the really early bus to work recently, which is an absolutely fantastic way to read a lot. Brockley has a great bus route that takes me practically to my office:



Anyway, I just finished reading Simon Schama's excellent 'The American Future' which is a book to accompany the BBC2 series of the same title.

Christmas gift from M. It's brilliant - a well written and conversational narrative that flits between contemporary interview and deep historical research. Basically its purpose is to trace current debates and controversies about the identity of the United States back to their various roots in the early years and decades of the country. Starting with war: what is the purpose of an American army? Then religious fervour - its contradictions, passions and aims. Then being an American - striking right to the heart of American identity and immigration, revealing all sorts of quite unsavoury elements that never quite go away... Then Plenty - the theme of being able to access/produce/conquer whatever is there, and where that might lead.
You could summarise it in Tocqueville's phrase "plus ca change", or in the words of Ecclesiastes "there is nothing new under the sun"...

But the coincidence I refer to occured the other night when we watched David Lynch's beautiful 'The Straight Story', film about an old man in the Mid West who decides to travel across to Wisconsin on his sit-on lawnmower to see his brother who has had a stroke and whom he hasn't spoken to in 10 years... (The lawnmower is because he doesn't have a driving licence...).
A beautiful film, and beautifully filmed, about coming to terms with age, settling your account, telling stories... It is really moving too. And this reveals the gentle side of life in the US, the importance of family, of doing the right thing, of making sure you treat people right, even if they're strangers, of imparting wisdom to the next generation... Inspirational stuff.
And it kind of made me think: as long as there are people in the US that resemble those of The Straight Story, in spite of all the troubled and conflicting undercurrents that Schama points out, we'll be OK.

Over and out - birthday tomorrow. 35. Ah well!

On Peeling Back Layers...

I've been meaning to write about this for ages. But something we're noticing a lot of in this house is the way layers have been added upon layers, covering up what was original about the house and its finish as people over the decades have 'modernised'. I've already written a fair bit about doors, which is one example, but over Christmas, I thought it would be interesting to explore the crazy paving in front of the house. Apart from anything else (its sheer ugliness for example...) the level was way too high and it was blocking the air vents...


So a bit of shoveling and pickaxe work later, what should we find but the original Victorian tile path! Very exciting.


Amazing what people will cover up in the name of modernisation. But then again, all things Victorian were deeply unfashionable in the 1960s and 1970s I guess. Looking ahead, maybe this poor path is destined for another 50 years under cover as we realise that our heritage and period obsession of the 1990s and 2000s was just a fad and that we had nothing to fear from the future after all...