Strong tea was the drink that fuelled the Industrial Revolution, sweetened with the newly cheap sugar from British slave plantations in the West Indies. If the working classes drank enough of this comforting sweet tea, they did not notice the inadequacy of their diets so much. Tea was no longer a luxury but a necessity.
Lovely, refreshing, luminous orange Irn Bru:
I used to drink this and Tartan Special quite a lot when I lived in Scotland.
Apparently it’s called “Sushi Bar“. It’s impossible for non-Japanese.
My not-so-new but favourite blog is Cooking Issues, which is the French Culinary Institute’s tech blog.
Some interesting articles to start with:
Image from NASA’s Terra satellite, huge version here.
I took this photo last week during the cold snap. It’s of a large field next to the house, covered in snow.
Click for the big version!
Here’s another — the enchanted forest:
Click for the big version!
Chipperfield Common, covered in snow:
I got a bit lost and had to follow my own footsteps back:
New sink …
Crazy Japanese …. One of them looks like lovely Yuka though.
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:
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.
N-tsun bought me a Ladybird book of British Birds for my birthday last week. By coincidence I just saw a large display of Ladybird books in the Oxfam in Berkhamsted. Quite expensive!
Some people are serious collectors of this stuff …
It’s been one year since I bought an iPhone, and to celebrate that I bought the Bijin Tokei iPhone application.
It shows you a different lady every minute. As the website says: “In addition, it is likely to be able to meet the same woman every 24hours.” (Really? Is that how it works?!)
Here is an excited looking Miss 18:45:
4 out of 5 for effort but sorry Miss 18:50 is saucier.
They’re also different (sometimes) from the ladies on the website:
Was it £1.79 well spent? You decide …
