October 2009 Archives

What is it with this recent fad to hide kitchens?

The charming missus and myself stopped off this morning to peek at the show suite for a nearby housing development. We are in the process of buying a house and I was a little worried we might see this place and decide it was much better than the house we had just committed to buying. Fortunately, this was not the case. It had two small bedrooms, three bathrooms and a narrow, unwelcoming kitchen shut off from the rest of the house with one small window.

It baffles me that they picked this flat with this kitchen as their show suite. After spending two seconds in it, I was relieved. There was no way they could possibly make the place cheap enough for me to want to buy it with a kitchen like that. It's not that I'm a super keen cook, mind you. But I do like to keep the Missus company when she is slaving over a hot stove.

For me, the kitchen is the most important room in the house. It's where you prepare your food. It's where you wash your dishes. It's where you make tea. You can even have sex in it as long as you clean up at yourselves properly.

DIY stores understand this. If you go into any DIY store anywhere in the world you will find them, for the most part, soulless, uninviting warehouses each containing one shining oasis in their centre: the kitchen display area.

Now that I think about it, I bet the DIY stores are in cahoots with the builders. They suck you into buying a place with a display lounge full of ornamental pelicans and leather sofas. As soon as you move in and go to make your first post-coital mug of tea you realise the kitchen needs to be redone, and so your run off to the DIY store. It wouldn't surprise me if this housing development was actually built by the B&Q.

Vicki and I spent the weekend in the Bear Hotel in Woodstock just outside Blenheim Palace in order to ride the 60 mile sportive in the Blenheim Bike Festival.

I had hoped to get around in time to watch the start of the Brompton World Championships, but took a bit of a detour which added 10 miles to my distance and also had to stop and call an ambulance for a couple of guys who crashed into each other.

This turned out to be a good thing for me as it was at this point I realised I was on the 100 mile loop instead of the 60 mile route.

Anyway, without the delay, I think I would have made it back for the start of the Bromptons. As it was, I covered 69 miles in 4 hours and 18 minutes, which I was pretty pleased with.

And it was gorgeous route with fantastic weather and the festival itself was pretty cool.

Vicki rode with a friend of hers from work and managed not to get lost and finish within her personal goal time of less than six hours.

Oh, and I also managed to kill the battery on my garmin before I started. But I did track the route with the GPS on my phone and was thus able to provide the lovely map above.

Pics of the day

And here's a video of the Brompton World Championships.