Food must either go bad faster here, or we North Americans are
\nused to rancid. The roast chicken is labelled EAT WITHIN 24
\nHOURS. It’s good for up to an hour unrefrigerated. My grapes
\nalmost expired by the time I got home. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
On the plus side, food seems to be less Americanized here.
\nThat is, the ingredient list does not take up two panels of the
\ncookie box. There is also a lot more organic and vegetarian food
\nreadily available. Well, readily if you are readily rich. Grapes
\nare $6 a pound. It’s cheaper to fly to Spain for $125 and pick
\nyour own.<\/p>\n
Our fridge is small. You might know this, but you do not
\nunderstand this. It is SMALL. We have two (2) shelves. Neither is
\nbig enough to fit a 2- litre carton of milk at any angle. The
\ncrisper is the size of a very large hamster. I would kill for the
\nbar fridge at the office.<\/p>\n
In a way, it’s very much like camping out. You carefully pack
\nand unpack your food each time you need some, taking care not to
\ncreate empty pockets. You light your stove with a match. You wear
\nmultiple layers of clothing. It’s the West Coast Trail X 2.5.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We live in a mews. It’s much better than living above a fish
\nand chips shop. It has heat (mostly).<\/p>\n
A mews is a converted stable. Our house is a little cottage
\n(room upstairs, room downstairs) connected to a mews down some
\nsteps. The mews has a very high ceiling but little light because
\nthe only windows face northwest onto a sunken, walled garden.<\/p>\n
The obvious solution to this is to put the most outlandish
\nwallpaper you can imagine up your one-and-a-half-storey walls.
\nSay, solid metallic silver with deep blue vines and giant yellow
\ntulips the size of your head. The agent had listed it as
\n“unusually decorated.”<\/p>\n
Actually, the end effect works surprisingly well. It’s like
\nbeing a cat crouched in deep grass.<\/p>\n
The mews itself contains a kitchen, dining nook and reading
\nnook plus glass french doors leading out onto a garden. The
\nkitchen is wide enough for two people stand if they intend to get
\nvery intimate. The garden is big enough to stand with your arms
\nout and spin if it were not full of shrubberies. It is full of
\nshrubberies.<\/p>\n
Each room is heated by a little wall heater that is
\nreminiscent of a fireplace. We’ve taken to heating just one room
\nof the house at a time. At the fish and chips shop, our favourite
\nsaying to anyone who got uppity about the lack of heat was “Put
\non another jumper!” To which the standard reply was “I’m already
\nwearing all my jumpers!”<\/p>\n
The English don’t actually believe in insulation. Their
\nconcept of insulation is to build your house smack against your
\nneighbours’ to steal their heat, those rich coal-hogging
\nbastards! Hence, our house is surrounded on three sides by our
\nneighbours sucking our hard-won heat, you coal-hogging bastards!
\n\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
I think part of our ceiling is someone else’s floor. It’s hard
\nto tell in urban jungles like this.<\/p>\n
The entrance to the house is past a very tall gate and into a
\nlittle courtyard, a couple of feet wide and the length of the
\n“cottage”, filled with plants, stone and shrubberies. At the end
\nof this, there is a drop into the tiny mews’ garden and a look
\ninto the french doors. When we first arrived, Michelle looked
\nahead at the mews and then to the “cottage” on our left and said
\n“Who lives there?” To which I replied, “You will, Love.”<\/p>\n
We live on a dead end back alley lane just a half block from
\nthe main road that runs along the sea wall. Heading few hundred
\nfeet down the sea wall and across another road and an acre of
\nsmall stones brings you to the crashing surf! I bounce in my head
\nevery time I think of this.<\/p>\n
The whole house is pre-furnished. This is good, because
\nunfurnished houses are often missing things like carpets, fridges
\nand stoves.<\/p>\n
Cozy is an apt description. Everywhere, there are rugs and
\ncarpets. Rugs on the walls, sofas with cushions, pictures of old
\ntime scenes. Little notes are scattered throughout making the
\nwhole experience seem very much like playing a game of Myst —
\nexploring someone else’s world.<\/p>\n
Despite having minimal light, the place is very lovely and
\ncharming. This is exactly the character-rich kind of house that
\none needs in order to know where they truly are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How fast does food go bad and our wonderful new home, as told by Stephen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[215,221,222,245,252],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sm-adventur3s","tag-england","tag-food","tag-furniture","tag-light","tag-mews"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}