I know
posted by Emma on 21 Jul 2008

your tolerance for house-moving updates will be as low as my tolerance for house-moving, by now. But you'll be reassured to hear that it's all done and dusted. Literally.
Is it just me who has to suffer the Skirting Boards of Shame, on a house move? I mean, I'm hardly the most diligent of housewives, but do people really pull out their wardrobes, cabinets and chests of drawers to hoover behind them? Oh, you do? Oh dear. When we looked around our empty London house, I couldn't believe the state of what's been going on behind our furniture. I blame smoky, smoggy, filth-laden London - not my cleaning habits.
Anyway, filth aside, the two sets of men did their thing (one of them 24 hours late, it should be noted, but never mind) and we now have one empty London house ready for decorating (thanks, Dave!) and one gorgeous country house with the furniture in the right place and - and be impressed here - all the books on the shelves, and all the clothes neatly folded and put away, AND everywhere hoovered and polished and dusted and cleaned to a sparkle. I am quite tired today! I'm not sure if cold viruses live in wardrobes, or dust or something, but Andy and I appear to have acquired one each, plus my hips are jippy, so we feel like physical wrecks today. Still - at least publishing requires you, for the most part, to be sitting down.
In other news: our weekend reading for when we needed a breather has been about bread and grammar. I'm going to badger Andy to do a guest book review for this blog on the book he's reading at the moment - Bread Matters: The State of Modern Bread and a Definitive Guide to Baking Your Own. The only possible conclusion from it is that, due to something called the Chorleywood process which allows manufacturers to make a loaf of bread in a couple of hours, eating shop-bought bread is very bad for your health. The process destroys all the vitamins present in the flour, which manufacturers then have to add back in (and put a nice marketing spin on it - "fortified with Vit C, E and B!"). It was only after this process was introduced in the 1960s that Coeliac's disease was recognised. It makes bread practically indigestible for many people. And we've been eating it now for 50 years. Gulp.
My reading has been Strunk and White's grammar book. I've never read it, because it's American probably, but Andy bought a copy recently and I was intrigued. It's so thin - about 70 pages - but incredibly concise. I find I can't read more than two pages at once before the grammar centres of my brain get overloaded.
So that's our weekend - bread, books and back-breaking homemaking. Hope you had a good one too!
Comments: 3

I'm glad you're promoting 'Bread Matters'. The state of commercially produced bread first came to my attention when I was working for a cheese specialist a couple of years ago, who also got into baking. It's awful, and particularly awful that - like so many foods - the good quality stuff is inaccessible due to price to the people who need it most.
I bake all my own bread, but I do use a bread maker, which doesn't suit the purists but minimises the back breaking.
Will look forward to Andy's post.
Posted by: Sarah Bower | July 21, 2008 12:24 PM
That book has been on my wishlist for ages – I must buy it! The author, Andrew Whitley, founded the famous and fabulous Village Bakery and Tea Room in Melmerby. It’s on the A686 between Penrith and Alston in Cumbria. If you ever venture so far north, Emma, you MUST call in for tea and buns. You’d love it.
Posted by: Dee Weaver | July 22, 2008 08:56 AM
That book sounds remarkable. I can't seem to get my homemade bread to rise properly, no matter what I try, or I would probably be baking all my own too.
Strunk and White is the only grammar book you'll ever need. They came out with an illustrated version here in the US last year, and I snapped it right up. I love it.
Sarah, I'm bowled over by the fact that you worked for a "cheese specialist" - that such a profession exists. This has set off all kinds of questions in my mind.
Posted by: KatharineC | July 23, 2008 01:29 PM