Cooking With Richard

I hope it won’t rain.

Hertfordshire open studios in and around Watford during September.

Here’s the news at Hemel Today.

Strange old day at the “village day”.

Wonder what they’re running away from …?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/features/eighties-season/

They are making a 2-part adaptation of Martin Amis’s excellent novel Money.

Oriental City was a large South-East Asian mall and community centre in North London, reasonably close to Colindale Station. It closed for redevelopment on 1 June 2008, though as of early 2010 the redevelopment appears unlikely to actually happen, and the new Pacific Plaza in Wembley looks much more promising. THIS LINK is a partial list of where the Oriental City traders have moved to. (Was it worth destroying a few acres of land and an entire cross-London community for this?)

Possibly Pacific Plaza might replace it. They have the Japanese crockery shop, but not yet the huge supermarket.

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We watched Young Hairdresser of the Year 2009(?) during a recent power cut …

Unlike Silverlink they can’t seem to run trains on time, so … http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Shitland

Something of a lost opportunity. The Two Brewers is a traditional pub in just about the perfect English village setting (yet close to London). With the right owner it could be a great pub, but instead it’s a moderate chain pub with restaurant-cum-hotel pretensions. The food was 5/10, certainly not bad, but nothing of note.

After months of wrangling and worry we finally exchanged contracts on our new house. Here it is. The strange raised section with a window on the right is the wretched flying freehold that caused everyone so much trouble:

The lane:

Big garden!

This is where Mito can stay when she comes. Probably when the house was built in the 1920s it was the toilet …

The village common:

Things have been tricky for the past couple of months because of the uncertainty about where we are going to move to, but it’s possible tomorrow we may have some good news …

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(But I thought the same thing yesterday too)

The BBC says they expect more spiders this autumn and BBC listeners have confirmed it. I’ve noticed many more spiders in the past couple of months. Here is a beautiful example from our garden, just a common garden spider, but she’s looks like a little tiger.

I got up at 7am this morning, got on a crowded train at 8, worked from 9 to 6.30, went for a quick drink, London Shitland was delayed on the way back, got home at 9.30! And now I’m knackered.

Going to London is overrated!

Today is the third anniversary of this blog. By some sort of dreadful anti-cosmic coincidence, it’s similar to the second anniverary.

Click to enlarge

Not sure about the whole message there, but anyhow … inspired by this advert, I bought a packet. 59p per packet, and they are quite tiny compared to the real pocky. Also the milk chocolate is horrible compared to the plain chocolate pocky they sell in Japan.

My cousin and I actually did Manic Miner in a whole weekend using an infinite lives poke and lots of reloading. But this is just ridiculous …

I love the way he does the Warehouse. IIRC we spent literally hours trying to work out that level.

(Nice bit of drama if you watch it all the way to the last level).