Packing for an English sabbatical

It is not a complaint, I love this flat and am extremely happy here, but there are a couple things I hadn't bargained for about the English sabbatical flat! I would have packed slightly differently if I had remembered the following:

In English October and November, it is colder inside than outside.

The thermostat seems basically placed to give the illusion of control, and there is no heat from radiators during the day.

The bathroom has a funny shower like a sort of plastic telephone booth - the water is hot and fully pressured, so that's the most important thing, but the bathroom itself is huge and drafty and unheated, and it is impossible to shave legs either in the shower (because the water runs down your legs in such a thick curtain when you are bent over vertically) or out (because the goose-pimples from freezingness catch on the razor).

The washer-dryer is a good amenity, and the washer aspect works fine, but these double-use machines are virtually useless as dryers, and the drying racks in the flat have to be positioned near functioning radiators if you actually want things to dry in a reasonable timeframe.....

Sabbatical makes twice-a-day exercise a near certainty!

Pants that are good for running are fine for yoga, but not vice versa; shirts that are fine for running sometimes fall down over your head in downward-facing dog and similar.

All of which is to say - I bought a pair of fleece pants a few weeks ago as a home comfort (regretted not bringing my Siberia running pants for indoor wear, and my Patagonia down sweater!), and have just descended on a local running store to repair other lacks: shirts that won't fall down when I am somewhat inverted, full-length running tights in case the leg-shaving conundrum remains insoluble (I think I found a good compromise the other day - it was after hot yoga, so I was fairly warm even after the chilly walk home, and I turned on the shower and left the door open and very hastily shaved my legs outside of the shower with shaving cream).

I may have to get some kind of a fleece blanket - I was so cold the other day I pulled a blanket from the warming cupboard, but it made me wheeze pretty severely and I think I should keep my distance from it!

"Blobbed by hand"

Roald Dahl on the golden age of British chocolate. (Via.)

Secrets of style

Handbag contents of the Queen Mother and Margaret Thatcher.

Lemsip and The Bill

Tarell Alvin McCraney's new play has a scotch egg in it! Seriously, though, when is this play coming to NYC?

"Sous les pavés la plage"

A striking bit from Tony Judt's latest installment of short memoirs in the New York Review of Books (subscription required):

Without question, the 1960s were a good time to be young. Everything appeared to be changing at unprecedented speed and the world seemed to be dominated by young people (a statistically verifiable observation). On the other hand, at least in England, change could be deceptive. As students we vociferously opposed the Labour government's support for Lyndon Johnson's war in Vietnam. I recall at least one such protest in Cambridge, following a talk there by Denis Healey, the defense minister of the time. We chased his car out of the town—a friend of mine, now married to the EU high commissioner for foreign affairs, leaped onto the hood and hammered furiously at the windows.

It was only as Healey sped away that we realized how late it was—college dinner would start in a few minutes and we did not want to miss it. Heading back into town, I found myself trotting alongside a uniformed policeman assigned to monitor the crowd. We looked at each other. "How do you think the demonstration went?" I asked him. Taking the question in stride—finding in it nothing extraordinary—he replied: "Oh I think it went quite well, Sir."

38p a packet

Trial Walkers Crisps flavors include Cajun squirrel and fish-and-chips:

Emma Rushin, a 26-year-old housewife from Belper in Derbyshire, burst into tears when she was told that her "builder's breakfast" flavour had made it to the final six.

Ms Rushin, who will put down a deposit on a house if she wins the competition, said: "First you get a hint of sausage, then egg, bacon, and last the buttery toast."

Casting her mind back to November when she learnt that she was in the last six, she recalled: "I think I was in shock for about three days."

After the entries were narrowed down and the finalists selected, food technologists set about creating the flavours in the laboratory, using a mixture of natural ingredients and unspecified "flavouring", which Walkers' head of flavour development, James Stilman, said were "natural flavour compounds" and not e-numbers.