Anyway it got me thinking about combinations I’ve loved in the past and then glutted on and totally gone off for a while: abanethy biscuits dunked in tea, dark rum and ginger beer (don’t forget the slice of lime) and at one time I would have done pretty much anything for a cheese and pickle sandwich (not your average one, mind. No pappy bread and greasy grated cheese uh uh- definitely on white with really thick crusts, the leading brand pickle (hehehe) and the sort of cheddar that makes you wince and your eyes water…aaahhhh).

Some combo’s are a little more odd- my friend Jess has been known to smother a yorkshire pud in jam and scoff it down- she swears by it but I can’t help thinking, jam is not gravy!

My boyfriend Tom would like to combine any foodstuff with either balsamic vinegar or ketchup, which ever is in stock or nearest. Be that- oh no! We don’t have any ketchup left to go on the eggs. Oh! Oh! we’re saved there’s some balsam’- that’ll do nicely, splatter splatter. blrrghh.

Have you any crazy or classic combo’s to let us know about down at the Laundry? Does your hubby like chilli jam on his mint choc chip, does your crazy aunt bertha swear by a splash of redwine vinegar on her strawberry jelly? Or maybe you possess in mind the taste combination winner that you’re dying to unleash- please! Tell us now, we’re salivating at the endless possibilities!

Did you know…that every year Norway donates a Christmas Tree to the people of Britain in recognition of the help Britain gave to Norway during the Second World War? Apart from this being quite a nice way to say thanks, there are a number of other rituals that accompany the giving of the tree that I have found personally quite charming, if a little funny when I imagine them in my head. Things like the selection of the tree. Imagine the Lord Major of Westminster, the Mayor of Oslo and the British Ambassador to Norway trekking through the Norwegian pine forest to hunt down the so-called ‘queen of the forest’; the carefully selected spruce that’s over 20 metres high and 50-60 years old. That image makes me smile. In fact any image with trees in it usually does the trick to be honest. But, did you know….that the tree is decorated with energy efficient light bulbs. No? Me either. I am heartened, I have to say.

Tell us about your tree, or about the time you visited Norway. Or any stories about Mayors or Ambassadors. Speak to us, we’re listening…

Greedy Pig

Dirty Dog

Culture Vulture

News Hound

Night Owl

Lazy Cow

Busy Bee

Cheeky Monkey

erm, no can’t think of any others.

But what, my dear Laundrettes, is the defining characteristic of a Walrus?

Love Rachel

After the film - I won’t ruin it just in case you’re going to watch it.  But afterward there was a debate with the film maker and a guy from channel 4 news.  How exciting I thought, no.  It was a really weird set up.  People asked peculiar questions, like why did you sacrafice style over content, you could see him thinking ouch and Channel 4 man stepped in a started to defend the shots of mountains and market scene.  All the while questioners were being bullied by an extrememly insistant american lady who kept on interupting people’s flow to get them to hold the microphone closer to their mouths.

After this pretty exhausting experience, my mind felt a bit addled.  So instead of going to the loo, like I’d told my friends, I thought I’d go and explore the building, woo hoo hoo.  I came across the fellows library, yes, I thought, I can get away as being a fellow of the RSA, despite wearing Sam’s eurohike pullover to keep warm, I have an air of….errrr followship?

So in Library I found this amazing book on the history of maps in London.  This is my really long way round introducing the history of finding the way.

I absolutely love finding the way, have an impeccable sense of direction, which comes in handy when route planning The Laundry lorry.  I’m also deeply intolerant of people who can’t read maps (I do try to keep that under wraps).  So imagine my luck when I found out that my boyfriend is part of an international community trying to make a free map of the world????  It’s better than googlemaps because you can stick anything you like on it.

Have a play aroud, if you type in clapham - you’ll find the area I mapped, along with all my favrourite pubs.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/

The oldest known maps are preserved on Babylonian clay tablets from about 2300 B.C.  Cartography was considerably advanced in ancient Greece. The concept of a spherical Earth was well known among Greek philosophers by the time of Aristotle (ca. 350 B.C.) and has been accepted by all geographers since.  Maps became increasingly accurate and factual during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries with the application of scientific methods. Many countries undertook national mapping programs. Nonetheless, much of the world was poorly known until the widespread use of aerial photography following World War I. Modern cartography is based on a combination of ground observations and remote sensing.

I hope we’ve all learned something today…eventually.

Rachel

Food fights are pretty much a disgraceful waste of scarce resources though, aren’t they? But I do have a banana squishing story to tell, but not til you tell me one of yours…

Have you any hairy nightmares for me?

I think it’s due the the restorative power of The Temptations.  I can’t remember the last time I was so happy as in that concert, so I’m treating you to the best cheer me up in town….

Click below for vintage clips that are bound to make you smile.

Get Ready (coz here I come)

Ain’t too proud to beg

My Girl

Half way through the concert, one of them leaning over looking really tired, another came up and said

“what the matter Otis?”

“Oh, I’m tired, so tired”

“Why are you tired Otis?”

“Because I’ve been doing this for 46 years!”

(Audience goes wild).

When I’ve been running The Laundry for 46 years I’m definately going on tour.

Enjoy.

Rachel

I’ve been so impressed with you Launderers’ poetic abilities in haiku that I am setting you another challenge. Palindrome! The curious art of making sentences read the same backwards as they do forwards. The word palindrome is derived from the Greek palíndromos, meaning running back again. Apparently there are a number of folk out there who dedicate a fair amount of their time working these out. Lawrence Levine wrote a palindromic novel of 31,957 words, Dr. Awkward and Olson in Oslo in 1986.

“In Eden, I,” a poem by Richard Cox published in Word ways takes a traditional palindrome ‘Madam, I’m Adam’ that bit further. Each line reads the same forward and backwards. Here is an excerpt:

Eve. Drowsy Baby’s word. Eve
Madam, I’m Adam
Named under a ban, a bared nude man.
Miss, I’m Cain, a monomaniac. Miss, I’m…
Diamond-eyed no-maid!

Here’s one I made earlier… (Or, more accurately, someone else made it and a mate once told me and for some reason unknown to either them or me, I have remembered it for about 10 years)

I saw desserts, I’d no lemons alas no melon distressed was I.

Your turn!

Some say pah, stupid americanised commercial money spinner (you  could buy a wooden broomstick in my local supermarket this year and a plastic pumpkin to hold your booty of sweets and a teeny-tiny pumpkin for carving for about 4 quid!!), but me? I can’t get enough of these opportunities for ruckus and collective celebration on a theme.

It gets quite good from here on in- a little sweetener to make up for the clocks going back:  bonfire night (simply one of the best, now it’s well into autumn I’ve lost all the despondency about the looming cold and dark after such a bloomin miserable summer and am ready to get cracking with some leaf kicking and smokey bonfire smells, especially seeing as there’s ACTUALLY more sunshine of late than the whole of the summer) , then, if you have any American connections (any! what-so-ever, like maybe you watched Dawson’s Creak once) it’s Thanksgiving, then it’s Chrimbo (and you could even count the first day you get to open your advent calender, and then every day from there on in, popping from its plastic mold a little tasteless chocolate, preferably before breakfast) then NYE (I know big old let down, but still every year I invest so much hope in making it the best night of the year), then after some gloomy self deprivation and whipping of one’s back with birch and things, it’s time for some good extra lovin’ on Valentine’s Day (another contentious issue with lots of people, like it’s just invented for hallmark to make money- I say, who cares! You don’t have to buy expensive pap and intensively grown roses you can just enjoy the moment of a day that celebrates Romance!), then and surely no one can argue with this old chestnut- Pancake Day woo hooo! Love it with lemons, love it with cheese, love it with bananas and chocolate, love the flipping, love the dropping on the floor…

Bung in a few birthdays and some,  you know, unorganised un-national celebrations of your own and that takes you pretty much back to spring and daffodils and little lambs etc where all should feel right as rain. But with no rain (plleeeeeeeease!).

What’s your fave festival out there, have I missed some crucial ones (probably)? Have you got any weird and wonderful traditions that you adhere to each year for Halloween or pancake day or new years day?

This week we are celebrating vegans at BioRegional by joining them in eating no meat or animal products for the whole week- see? Yet another festival to make the year go round!

A short poem for my short comings at not putting enough time aside for the blog - bad planning.

I’d like you to take inspiration from the poem, get your creative juices flowing/rushing/whooshing and tell me about other accidents that inanimate objects might have.

Rachel

Thankfully, my kitchen stories of horror cannot be paralleled with my colleague Amy, whose kitchen, unbeknownst to her and her housemates, had an enormous hole in the wall through which the kitchen floor would regularly get flooded. When it dried out, it would grow proper mushrooms and everything. The landlord thought the step outside the back door was wonky and that was diverted the rain in…

(That reminds me of my mum’s morris traveller car that grew two beautiful little mushrooms in the back. I’m sure they harboured naughty faeries that made me rubbish at reverse parking.)

Mice, wiggly things, creepy crawly things? Don’t hold back; we have strong constitutions over ‘ere.

Tell us of your kitchen horrors!

I saw a couple of magpies on the way to work this morning, and saluted them both, which is what I’ve always done. But, (after thinking ‘ooh maybe magpie superstitions could make a good little laundry blog’) I looked into the mythology and the rhyme a wee (wikipedia) bit once I got in, and I now have reason to be believe I may have been approaching the whole thing with totally the wrong superstitious logic…

It all has to do with the first line- ‘One for sorrow’. Apparently the bird is associated with all things bad and unfortunate, in part a bit of a harsh judgement not based on anything but a character trait to go after shiny things in a coveting manner and also a bit of a nasty grating call. But this association with bad stuff in general only comes into play when you’re faced with one magpie. 2 is a goody.

Steph really believes in magpies- ‘too sly magpie!’ is what she hollers at him when she comes across one. This is her own take on the much longer and more formal ‘Good Morning Mr Magpie, how are your wife and children? What a fine bird you are!’ I had never heard of this! I’m so out of it, pah, saluting- hardly adequate for protecting yourself against the witchery of a lonelsome magpie. If you want to encourage good luck instead of bad its advisable to say some sort of greeting.

Any magpie stories for us? Come accross three of them and popped out three chicas the next day? Any more orignal words with which you greet the squarky fellas? Wow us with your black and white feathered fables pleeeeaaase!

Should be all whizzy and carefree this week, but it got me thinking about some tooth nasties.

So I’ve wapped teething problems into the search engine and guess what comes up? BBC america (I didn’t know this existed) have made a documentary called “The Worst Teeth in Britain”, the traiters, we all know that the yanks think we have a mouth full of ugly nashers, we don’t need our national treasure confirming the suspicion and I’m not talking about Hugh Grant. 

They say “There is an epidemic of poor teeth in Britain. 1 in 5 people never visit the dentist. 1 in 10 is terrified of the dentist chair. Sugar consumption, eating disorders, and bad diet make Britain’s global reputation for being a nation of terrible teeth completely justified”.

Pah, other shows include “Too Ugly to Love” and “My Secret Female Body”, shame on you BBC.

I had a brace for five long years, my  incisors had to travel a whole centimetre when they decided to yank  four of the out, that’s the equivalent of the moon and back in teeth terms, scientifically speaking. Shame I ruined a good start with excessive coffee and red wine consumption.

Time for the confessional, the worst teeth experience I’ve ever had was when kissing this guy, we sort of slipped and bashed mouths and his false tooth and plate fell into my mouth!  shiver.  Well he was an anarchist.

Teething problem, stories please…

There is some debate about the first ever website, some say Al Gore claimed to invent the www, others say that’s hear say – some people accuse me of not knowing the difference between the internet and the world wide web, some people might be right.But here I can unofficially let you into the secret of the first website and here it is:

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

It’s a beauty ain’t it?

Some guy called Tim Berners-Lee (an Oxford grad in physics) invented the web as a way of posting information for physicists at the European Particle Accelerator at CERN.

It’s those trouble makers again.  Just as I had forgiven them when we didn’t all get sucked into a big black hole when they tried to recreate the big bang in a concrete tunnel in France…they get me all riled up again.  They are to blame for my-face, hours and hours of wasted time refining search words in yahoogle and yes, I couldn’t believe this either www.sugardaddie.com.  Pesky scientists and their big ideas.

HA!  I wonder if this blog spot will cause as much controversy as the big cardie commotion. I hope so, winky winky wink.

Of course the web isn’t all bad; it has all the answers, all of them.  These are the questions I’ve asked it…

How was bread invented?
How was butter invented?
How was cheese invented?
How was cake invented?

Ok, so maybe I’ve only tested it out on food innovation, but I’m sure there are more answers out there.  Please ask the web something and post it for us.

And finally here are my current favourite websites:

www.last.fm

www.freecycle.org

http://www.smallfilms.co.uk/ivor/makeivor.htm

and of course the new

www.thelaundry.biz

Tell your www.blues.com and www.hurrahs.com