Happy Friday, it’s still very hot and I’m not coping. Links this week..
1) This. A thousand times this…
It’s detailing that the human rights of living people shouldn’t be eroded by perceived rights of those yet to be born.
2) I don’t want to make one of these, but if someone could and deliver it to me for my birthday, that would be great.
3) What to eat in a heatwave..
4) There’s been quite a bit of stuff about housing this week, these letters sum it up quite nicely.
Leila at Bookshelves of Doom has an etsy shop. This could be very dangerous..
This is fantastic though. Who doesn’t want to want a ‘very hungry caterpillar’ stamp around their neck?
This weekend I took exactly two photos.
The lazy Friday night pizza – stuff on sourdough, it was delicious
These lights as we were packing up Grace on Saturday night. Labyrinth and BBQ as it tradition. Steve took more photos of us doing the actual thing not just the pretty lights..
The theatre on Sunday afternoon. It was Othello and the acting was great but I have trouble with the play and as soon as Othello starts being a dick, I just get really annoyed. We may have to add Othello to Chekhov as plays I need to take a chill pill before seeing. However, Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear are two actors that are well worth seeing on stage, whatever they are doing..
Other than that, I sat in the garden with the godchildren, baked bread, washed all the things, worried about my poor sick parent and tried to sleep through the heat.
This week is pretty low key for me, we’ll all set for a week of high temperatures here and I’m having a couple of breathing issues (love the city, don’t love the pollution!), so work, home and early nights are the order of the day.
I know it’s for children but it’s called Flossy the Cloud (one of the many things my mother calls me is Flossy!)
1) North/South Food on why food banks are not the answer. Can’t agree more…
The welfare state is, despite all the claims to the contrary, is a safety net. It’s a brilliant brave thing that gives more back to the nation that it takes. But it’s a precarious thing. You can’t stride across a safety net: you have to shuffle and strategise and take the help given to get to the other side. It can be slow going and it needs trust and courage. It doesn’t need a pit of crocodiles underneath and high winds. But that’s what the Welfare Reform Bill has brought. It’s going to push more people to food banks and it’s going to affect you even if you don’t think it will.
2) Behind the scenes of The Wire. I love The Wire but it sounds like it was stressful.
“He was pissed, man. And I got it, because, in effect, we were firing him,” said George Pelecanos, the crime novelist who wrote the episode. “David and I went to his trailer and tried to talk him down. We said, ‘This is the end of the character. We can’t keep his story going; it’s not logical. And this is exactly the way he would probably go out.’” Elba fixated on the urination. Omar wouldn’t be peeing on him, Simon and Pelecanos said; he’d be peeing on a fictional character. “Not on my character,” Elba told them.
3) Food Intolerance maybe in your head. Interesting.
Occasionally, as with vaccines and climate change denial, alarmism veers into paranoia, yielding accusations that a shadowy East Asian cabal is paying off scientists and journalists to regurgitate their propaganda. (Ajinmoto Corporation, I await your check!) For a small minority, MSG sensitivity somehow became more than a medical condition, and challenging its physiological basis poses a threat to their very identity. The harmfulness of MSG, a seemingly trivial assertion, took on the importance of a religious doctrine, a fundamental truth to be defended at any cost. But why?
4) Christina is running and made a video, go and give her money, please…
I’ve been told several times that I’m hard to buy for. I of course utterly reject this notion, there’s lots of wonderful things in the world and I like a lot of them, but the truth is that there is very little I need. Also although I love them, I really don’t expect presents but when I do get them, I like the element of surprise. I also hate having to do the “is that too much, am I being greedy?” dance in my head as I try to think about the things I like and they may want to buy because really I’m happy with a card, flowers rock my world, no-one can ever buy me too many flowers!
So I cheat and direct them towards my mother. However, at the moment the world seems to be full of marvellous things, so if I see something I love, I’m going to post about it here and maybe you’ll like it too and maybe Ma can point people in the direction of this blog when she gets asked about presents..
First up is this.
I know. I want about 4 with different words on them. Although I pretty much love everything on the site…
From Vinegar and Brown (via Domestic Sluttery).
There’s just no pleasing me. For months I’ve been complaining about the grey, miserable weather. Now in the midst of sunny, hot weather I’m fed up with it already.
The sad truth is that I love the lighter days in summer but can’t stand the heat. At all. I just don’t have any energy, I’m sweaty and uncomfortable, I don’t sleep well, I’m more grumpy than usual (so extremely!) and I don’t want to eat anything (actually that one isn’t so bad both my budget and my waistline could do with slimming!)
Added to the heat we also have the city’s favourite summer tricks, pollen, pollution and commuting. The underground is a marvellous thing but not all that great when it’s packed with sweaty, smelly people. Welcome to London, please use more deodorant.
I’m fairly used to it and always travel with tissues, water and a plastic bag (the last because the migraines often cause throwing up – I’ve actually stopped being embarrassed by it and just try to do it quietly, apologising as much as I can). Others are not and people are fainting a lot. Two journeys a day, 4 delays due to passenger alarm being pulled so far this week and I was working from home yesterday! That’s a lot of fainting and because and this year there are no extra staff to pull them off the trains quickly (last year we had the Olympics and TfL got all fancy). So we wait, in the heat and people begin to feel faint and so it goes on…
That’s just general though and I can handle the commute. Harder is pollen and pollution. We had a really long winter and cold spring this year, so the usual tree pollen followed by grass pollen didn’t happen, it all hit at once. I take an anti-histamine daily during the summer and normally that’s fine. Not this year, this year I’m using my inhaler, usually just used before an outside run in the evening, every morning or I can’t breathe by the time I’ve walked to the station. Which is not good.
If the heat is making me more irritable than usual, next door have been renovating their house for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for the last 8 weeks. There’s only so much banging and drilling and sanding a person can take, but we’ll add to that the Middle Eastern equivalent of Celine Dion, warbling her way through cheesy music, a dog that has a barking problem in that it won’t stop and a bloody rooster crowing in the distance (you already know my thoughts on chickens in cities) and I am about demented with being really, really cross.
Embracing the good weather and frolicking through fountains is probably not going to happen this week!
Nic Dempsey 