The power’s off or the washing machine’s out of order. You’ve got a huge amount of washing to do and you can’t let it wait until the washing machine’s fixed or the power comes on. An unlikely scenario? Not quite. This writer has been in this situation several times, the worst of which happened when [...]
We all know that we need to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables. At the very least, we should be eating five servings every day of fruit and vegetables – if not more (each serving size should be the size of your fist.). And canned stuff, for the most part, just won’t do. Fresh or [...]
When I look at the stereotype of the 1950s housewife, I think that she (a) is damn lucky not having to juggle running a house AND look after small children AND hold down a job, (b) has impossibly high standards of cleanliness. It seems absolutely ironic that the women’s movement allowed women to do more [...]
You’ve been having a bad week cleaning wise and the place is a mess, or else you have busy children who seem to strew toys and other belongings around the house. And you’ve just had a phone call to say that your mother, mother-in-law or the boss is coming round within the next hour You [...]
Vinegar is made in the same way that wine, beer and cider are made – by fermentation. In fact, if you leave wine uncovered while it is brewing, you’ll get vinegar very easily. But whether you have white vinegar (from wine), malt vinegar (beer) or cider vinegar (from cider – obviously), there are more things [...]
Call it what you will: the necessary, the powder room, the loo, the lavatory, the thunderbox, the jakes, the euphemism or other terms that aren’t quite so printable, the toilet is one part of every house that is unpleasant to clean. It’s unpleasant to clean even if you’ve got reasonably tidy household members. If you [...]
“There are four things which are little on the earth, but they are exceedingly wise: ants…rock badgers…locusts… The spider skilfully grasps with its hands and it is in kings’ palaces.” So wrote Solomon in the Biblical book of Proverbs (chapter 30 v 24–28). However, Proverbs said nothing about the slave or other worker who had [...]
If you have children that love books, the chances are that one day they will love them to bits. Books can get torn, scribbled on or left outside in the rain (when I was a child, I once left a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in a treehouse overnight). And old [...]
Natural wood and wood grains are beautiful for furniture and other household objects. They’re beautifully tactile, a nicely polished or sanded surface giving a combination of soft smoothness with a faint hint of texture given by the woodgrain. Each type of wood has its own “fingerprint” of grain: pine is stripy, oak is more mottled [...]
The best things in life are free. Never has this old saw been truer than in the case of sunshine.
Every day, even on cloudy days, the sun puts out 89,000 TW of solar power into the earth’s atmosphere. By comparison, global energy consumption in 2004 was 15 TW (TW is the SI unit for terawatts, [...]
