BOF and the Most Efficient Holiday

Belligerently Optimistic Flatmate had a week off recently. He used it wisely, as a springboard for money-saving initiatives. I'm not sure if this is normal. Back at university, whole weeks could slip by without the achievement of a single task. Now that we're grownups, every hour not spent in useful activity is an hour wasted. 

Case in point: last year, my friend Sam (Surprisingly A Mother) had a baby. On the first day of maternity leave from her cut-throat shiny-happy job, she tweeted: 'So much free time! What shall I do with myself?'

Being green is sexy

Oh Sam. How can this be? Was it so long ago that we were students applauding ourselves each time we produced a sentence? We spent whole weeks in Topshop; hours on Facebook; days walking to and from the library in a nonchalant fashion. Not to mention all that time playing quiz machine. The very act of tweeting bespeaks an unhealthily efficient attitude to social media. 

To return to BOF, now investigating insulation. The first step was the acquisition of meters. As I understand it, the council provides such things for free on request. Apparently, our saving on electricity may amount to almost a whole pound per month. The downside is that the cold water no longer runs. How very green.

But Project Efficiency did not end here. Next came the world's most thorough washing-up episode. Pans, spoons, unused tea-pots: nothing was forgotten. It was great. BOF even took the thin vases in hand (fret not money-saving mavens, the retail orgy* that produced them took place in IKEA). They are impossible to clean: but he did have a good go at getting a sponge stuck inside one with a wooden spoon.

I should take some responsibility for the money-saving madness. I performed a devious act a few weeks back. I discovered the bargain that is Sainsbury's own brand tea. 

'Bring back the PG' begs BOF

27p! Eighty tea bags! Surely they couldn't be twelve times worse than your average PG Tip? 

They are. The tangy taste of dust puts a real downer on your day. What I want to do is bin them. But we've renounced waste, so we muscle through. 


BOF thinks I haven't noticed that he has been surreptitiously buying new tea and adding it to the top of the 27p box. One day, we will stumble across our Basics Tea again, decomposed to compost at the bottom of the cupboard, a small tea tree growing from it. 

We shall use it for a window box! The greenest of city activities. Equilibrium restored.

*That will play havoc with my keyword search. I've already had 'horny cockroach' bring someone to the Kate in the Countryside homepage this week. What a disappointment that must have been.

MD, Nigella and me

Worth it?

Back at the Pad, our entertaining ambitions have peaked with the acquisition of a Nigella Cookery Book. Laters to Jamie, at the Pad we're all about aspirational nightlights and tablecloths and cake. While BOF wows all with a selection of healthy and nutritious main courses, I generally stick to the non-compulsory element of the evening (cake). And, er, Nigella lipstick.

Dinner party pitfalls are many and varied. But both MD and Bofles (BOF's younger brother) were in London this weekend, so we knew we had to up our game: this was to be the uber-dinner party, where we gathered together all we had learned from the previous few.

As BOF and I readied ourselves for the MD-Day Sups, we stilled our nerves with the thought that we were entertaining veterans by now, and previous dinner parties had passed off OK. True, it would have been better if I hadn't cut my hand on a blunt knife last week while washing up and bled all the way through pudding. But BOF, belligerently optimistic as ever, reinterpreted the grotesque spectacle as symptom of our devotion to dinner, and our guests were duly grateful.

More blood injuries were sustained another day, when an enthusiastic chum almost sliced a finger off with cavalier cocktail-making and retreated to the bathroom whimpering. But a monkey plaster and a caipirinha later, he was only emboldened by his injury. Though perhaps I shouldn't have chased him and others out of the door with a steak knife when they admitted that they weren't keen for clubbing actually, and they didn't want a coffee from the coffee machine either.

And, yes, when we accidentally set fire to our (Mother BOF-loaned) tablecloth the week before there was some confusion: (BOF) 'Ah. What's the consensus on what we should do at this point?'. But from the brink of calamity Precociously Media-Savvy friend (PMS) saved us all. Just as the napkins burst into flames, she threw her glass of water in the the blaze with sniper-like accuracy. Soaked salad, wax and oil combined deliciously to form the main course.

But these small misunderstandings and incompetences just paved the way for the presence of Bofles and MD at our table. And on the scale of incompetence? Well. I ran out of time to make a cake, and then was so worried about my only dish not being on the menu I had to be restrained from compulsive baking at 7.45 that night. And MD managed to peep over the disproportionately high table despite her Thumbelina proportions (we gave her the only proper chair). But otherwise… people left on time, no one shouted, no blood was spilled or fires started. Pagan it was not.

Frankly, it was rather a disappointment. We'll have to have the team back again. Perhaps with the addition of the Fight Clubbers from down the road. That should do it.

Spring Cleaning at Buckingham Palace

In the run up to the most discreet nuptials ever conducted, I'm seriously concerned that this curious bash will stir the Met into decisive action over my work walk short cut by the palace. Every morning I fear today will be the day. 



Buck Pal Fountain: Subtle Imperial Iconography

It was when I first observed the pre-wedding buffing of the (already clean) bronze sculptures outside Buckingham Palace that I realised my fence gap's days were numbered.

You see, BOF and I had a dinner party the other night. As we prepared, I realised I'd absorbed MD’s attitude to entertaining. [Yes, dear reader, I'm about to contrive a comparison of MD to the Queen: bear with me.] Back in the countryside if guests were coming I would be enlisted to help with polishing, table-laying, hoovering, pot-plant-reorganisation - that sort of thing. No matter that the upstairs cupboard would have no part in the proceedings (unless confused guests got lost perhaps), no corner was left unmolested.


So at the Pad this week, I got crazy with the hoover MD-wise, while BOF constructed deliciousness. At some point I decided a cake was necessary - then threw flour all over the place before conducting an inept floor clean and forgetting the actually visible expanses of carpet. Twenty minutes before our guests were due to arrive, I realised that the sitting room [sorry - The Dining Room today] furniture needed moving. Too worried that BOF would try and talk me out of my labour-intensive completely unnecessary new room plan, I threw sofas about by myself for fifteen minutes. 

In the end, the room looked - frankly - exactly the same. I'd had little or no impact - other than to traumatise BOF enough that he poured almost an entire extra bottle of wine into the coq au vin.

Back at the Palace (Liz's, not ours), fountain-cleansing has been going for about a month now, all sweat and comedy brow-rubbing from the workers to indicate endeavour. As I walked past last week, protective wooden crates around the statues were being removed to show that ... nothing had changed. The marble supports were perhaps a little more water-stained, but that was it.

Alas, shocker - no pics of Queenie plus
Mids Senior to be found. Nice plate-hat though

What happened was this: one day Queenie was sitting up in the palace with Mrs M observing the outrageous dullness of the bronze statues from the window. ‘Something must be done, Mids’, she doubtless said. So it was. The impact is less than marginal, but that’s not the point.

Like MD in the countryside awaiting her guests, or BOF and Kate in the Pad, having people over requires manic and obvious commitment to cleanliness. Bess knows this. She knows about dear Sarkozy's eagle eye for discoloured bronze and Princess Leitiza of Spain's disgust for gappy fences. Forget the Olympics, this Big Sloane Send-off is the Queen's house party including dinner with six courses. My poor wonky fence doesn't stand a chance.

Next Episode: Goodbye Childhood Home - The Conclusion