…while I love my little house, and my kitchen couldn’t possibly fit another thing in it, and I don’t normally ‘do’ wishing for the impossible/improbable, I did coo and ahh over some of these – i especially liked the peas, the tardis, the dalek and the vw
…amazing refrigerators
This post should properly be tagged ‘a bit girly’, and ‘not a recipe at all’ – however, I like to think of it as ‘waste not, want not’ 🙂
I’ve got lots of flowers growing in the communal part of the garden at the front of our little row of terraced houses – I don’t normally pick them unless I want to give a bunch to a friend– they’re mainly there for the insects and to disguise the fact I’m growing fruit and veg as well. At least one of my neighbours would probably complain if it started to look like an allotment 😦
The full on gale that we had last week in London blew quite a lot of flowers over and broke their stems, so I picked this small bunch of ranunculus for indoors. They last for a week or so in a vase, but the petals also dry really well – the colours mellow a little, but end up looking very sophisticated, and the best thing is, they are gossamer thin and still supple – they make brilliant confetti, lightly fluttering down just like the paper kind (only much posher and biodegradable.) 🙂
S, if you have some in your garden or you get given a bunch, you can extend their season of glory. Remove gently from the flower head, a few at a time, separate and leave to dry.
You don’t even have to wait to be invited to a wedding, they also look lovely scattered on a white tablecloth for a ‘make your guests feel a bit pampered and special’ meal.
This is not an advert. This will not get your house any cleaner, nor make the process any easier or more efficient. Read on …
So, in my house, the bathroom is actually a wet room, which makes it the most modern room, the smallest and the easiest to clean, hence for these reasons and it’s comparative lack of furniture, I usually leave it until last…but last Saturday week, having ‘virtuously’ already made my megasoup ;-), I started cleaning the bathroom first, and just before I gave the floor it’s final mop, I paused to admire the sparklyness and a eureka moment occurred…I went and fetched a clean towel and my favorite ‘comfy but stylish’ dress from the clean laundry, folded them neatly on the toilet seat, mopped the floor and closed the door. Already felt I deserved a cup of tea, so had a 5 minute break and then carried on cleaning as normal. Indeed, I cleaned ’til I could clean no more – which doesn’t mean I finished, by any stretch of the imagination – but that I was knackered and aching all over – I seem to be having a junkpurge this year…the house, though cleaner in parts looked like a science lab where multiple experiments had gone seriously wrong.
What joy!, what bliss!, then, to walk into a shiny, shiny pristine bathroom and close the door… I emerged 30 minutes later clean and serene. After dinner, it occurred to me that all sensible grown ups probably did this, but it had just taken me years to catch on…but since then, I’ve asked quite a few ppl, mainly older women, and none of them do this, but all of them thought it was a good idea.
The principle advantages are:-
1. you have a generally rosier associated memory with spring cleaning.
2. you don’t ache so much the next day that you can’t get up and do some more.
3.you don’t feel so fractious when your dearly beloved don’t notice your hard work/come in and make a mess straight away.
…I know I don’t live with a creature anything like as annoying as another human, but Curdle, that most esteemed of felines, appears to be in training for ‘Miss Muddy Paws 2013’ at the moment – which involves her coming in with filthy feet and finding a clean surface, any surface (window sills, kitchen floors, furniture, bed linen, open books, but the cleaner the better) and quite literally treating it like a catwalk – she then comes to find me and does a little twirl – it seems these twirls fall into 4 categories – cute, clever, comic or cuddly. Bless.
doledrumdiva 