George & MaryI came home tonight to find yet another pile of mystery soot to clean up. What did the common people do to amuse themselves before the invention of soot? Evenings must have dragged somewhat in those dark days. I'm sure that by the eighteenth century many large country houses had teams of soot cleaners armed with bellows and brushes and donkey carts fully employed on a 24 hour basis on the extraction and removal of their stately soot. It may of course just be our persistent use of tons of cheap Eastern European coal bought on the black market (of course).
Random use of the Wikipedia site keeps me level headed and peaceful these lunch times. Today I researched the R101 catastrophe, the Hindenburg crash and the SS Lusitania, so tragically lost some where south of the Irish coastline in 1915. Disasters make oddly compulsive reading, truth is stranger etc. I also browsed the ex-girlfriends of George Best and the ongoing weight problems experienced by one time Cheers bar-person Kirstie Alley (or was that another actress?).
Once the daily soot clean up was over it was straight out into the customary May hurricane and rain weather cocktail to cut the grass and render the garden a better shade of respectable. You never know when an irritated and impatient passing funeral party or some tiny private wedding group will crane their necks over the hedge and issue loud "tut tuts" and waggle their pointy fingers at our green constructions and ongoing landscape projects. After that I ate a whole pizza and am now regretting that I did.
Random use of the Wikipedia site keeps me level headed and peaceful these lunch times. Today I researched the R101 catastrophe, the Hindenburg crash and the SS Lusitania, so tragically lost some where south of the Irish coastline in 1915. Disasters make oddly compulsive reading, truth is stranger etc. I also browsed the ex-girlfriends of George Best and the ongoing weight problems experienced by one time Cheers bar-person Kirstie Alley (or was that another actress?).
Once the daily soot clean up was over it was straight out into the customary May hurricane and rain weather cocktail to cut the grass and render the garden a better shade of respectable. You never know when an irritated and impatient passing funeral party or some tiny private wedding group will crane their necks over the hedge and issue loud "tut tuts" and waggle their pointy fingers at our green constructions and ongoing landscape projects. After that I ate a whole pizza and am now regretting that I did.
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