iL Dottore

A very salient point, Andy. I sometimes wonder if the UK would be better off building Euro-style (and quality) apartments instead of trying to cram smaller and smaller houses into poorly thought out and designed “developments” in Britain’s remaining green space. I would have thought that the government would have made the (re-) development of brown-field sites a priority - providing tax breaks and - if necessary - subsidies for cleaning up such sites. Having an open plan arrangement in a tiny house does have solid logic behind it. But I notice, from programmes like Grand Designs, even those with both the space and the money to do otherwise go for open plan layouts (OPL). in fact, I would go as far as to argue that OPL has become an architect’s cliché. Along with: Flat roofs Square and boxy buildings Overabundant, nay, excessive use of concrete, glass and steel floor to ceiling windows no curtains and no blinds polished concrete floors glossy, shiny, kitchen cupboards and furniture* A lot of these builds, appear - at least to my eyes - to be of the “look at how much money I can throw at an on-trend architect to build me a house” types. The great Terry Pratchett made a comment or two about modern architecture, one of which was along the lines of “it was a newly built house by a famous architect. You could tell that it was new as the windows hadn’t yet fallen out or the flat roof started leaking” There is a reason traditional architecture looks the way it does…. * do you know how hard it is to keep high gloss finished cabinets clean and finger print free? You’re constantly wiping down and polishing the surfaces (as a friend found out to his cost when his missus got such a kitchen)

Morning! Unfortunately today I had another 3am “emergency poo run” with Lucy, poor mite. Fortunately, a vet visit for Schotty is scheduled for early next week (for his physiotherapy) so we’ll take Lucy as well. Thanks for your comments, it does look like that we will be going for the penthouse flat rather than the garden flat (it got the seal of approval from GP Friend and Mrs GP Friend - which has helped nudge Mrs iD towards the [ahem] “right” decision). I’ve never understood this craze for open plan living. OK, I get the point that you may want to be sociable, but do you really need to turn your flat/house into an approximation of an aircraft hangar or warehouse to be so? I think that there’s a lot to be said in favour of dedicated rooms (so library/smoking room, home office, m**** r****** room and so on). Another consideration is that with dedicated rooms you can avoid the “whole house smells of XXXX” scenario (plus, separate rooms means that I can have my wicked way with the young scullery maid in the library and not disturb Mrs iD having Earl Grey Tea and buttered crumpets with her friends in the withdrawing room). To answer PB’s question we would have access to a communal garden, though “garden” may be stretching tye definition a bit - flower beds in the front and a narrow lawn at the back. Moving house: Oh What Fun…..

Küche is kitchen. I certainly don't want to talk to my guests when I'm cooking. Mrs iD does the "gracious hostess" bit, whilst I cook up a storm in the kitchen. Besides, you won't believe how long the cheesy pong from a Fondue hangs around....

Well, "zimmer" just means "room" - so they can fulfill any function wish. The number of bedrooms that will be needed will depend upon the <nocturnal snoring situation> - currently a topic of much debate 🤣😁 The garden apartment has been designed with an open-plan kitchen/dining/room space, something I utterly LOATHE*, but as we are still at the architect's plans stage, these can be amended. * I'm afraid I'm very old fashioned and prefer dedicated rooms to open plan living.

Re. older dogs: My two (Schotty and Lucy) are definitely aging (Schotty is about 12 - 13 and Lucy about 14 - 15) but are doing well. Both are rather stiff in the morning and Schotty - like iD - has arthritis. I take diclofenac on a PRN basis, whilst Schotty gets a dose of a Cox2 inhibitor plus gabapentin (half a dose in the morning, a full dose in the evening). He also gets regular physiotherapy. Lucy is now almost completely deaf - (although I sometimes wonder how much of Lucy's deafness is like Mrs iD's [ahem] "hearing limitations": i.e. selectively turned on and off!) and she still has intermittent GI problems and could stand to gain a kilo or two, but otherwise both she and Schotty are happy and pain free (the aches of aging excepting). At this rate we could see both Schotty and Lucy getting to 16 or so. ION In the ongoing saga of leaving Schloss i.D. for pastures new, we now have two candidates in mind: one, an existing penthouse (which covers the entire top floor of the building) and the other a yet-to-be-built state-of-the-art eco garden apartment. Both have positives and negatives. Here are the two apartment footprints. I'm slightly more in favour of the penthouse, Mrs iD the garden apartment. The penthouse apartment is slightly larger at 170m2 Thoughts? ION-2 I'm getting seriously cheesed off at the travel agent who arranged my trip to Japan last year. I decided to use them again this year and I tasked them to (amongst other things) find me an advantageous Business Class fare to Japan using Asian airlines and novel routings (as our chum @jjb1970 has often spoken about) - so what do they do? They offer me two routings out of LHR at astronomical prices - the sort of price I would be quoted (as a non travel industry person) by booking on the airlines' own websites. I thought that travel agents could use their purchasing muscle and insider knowledge and status to get very advantageous fares (in this case, obviously not). I had a go myself, and without much effort found a routing through Shanghai for 1/2 of the price of the cheapest flight offered by the travel agent! Unless they up their game, they may find themselves loosing a customer....

Which is why properly qualified handwerker and craftsmen are thin on the ground in the UK. Brits tend to be very snobbish about skilled craftsmen and tradesmen and frequently don't want to pay them a fair fee for what they do. Being a neurosurgeon and being a qualified and certified electrician are different jobs - but both can have fatal outcomes if the responsible individual doesn't do his/her job properly. Both jobs require academic and practical credentials, not to mention lengthy training and lots of supervised work whilst in training. You wouldn't want to get a neurosurgeon "on the cheap", so why get an electrician or plumber "on the cheap"? Maybe it's an "it's an easy DIY job*" mentality or perhaps it was the skilled Eastern European workers being paid poorly by UK standards (but making a lot of money by their own - home - standards) that has lead to this "they have to be cheap" mentality. I would argue that it's this refusal in the UK - pretty much across the board - to pay decent prices, salaries and fees** that has led to much of the UK's infrastructure (public and private) not being properly maintained. * I've read a book or two about neurosurgery and thus I'm supremely confident that I could do some DIY brain operations on friends if they wanted to save some money. ** as mentioned before, the UK is a low wage/high tax economy

What you clearly need is a LMWDIFY (a Little Man Who Does It For You). This will allow you to both avoid injury AND have time for your M**** R******!

Sorry PB, that wouldn't work - no matter who you claim told you to do it, you still have responsibility for your actions. However..... However, if you said to the Judge "a Polybear came to me in a dream and together with the Easter Bunny, Father Christmas and the Local GP* told me that it was the Holy Command of The Great God of Pasta Buitoni [may he always be al dente] that I do it" the Judge will regard you as criminally insane and send you to a nice comfy rubber room instead of a cold cell surrounded by dangerous scrotes... * it perhaps doesn't need repeating that these are entirely mythical beings.,,

I note that a number of posters want the authorities to "get off their **** and do what they are supposed to do" but to no avail. However, it also seems that they are also afeared that should they "DIY" (so to speak) they will "get their collars felt" by the local plod and get banged up in the chokey. My advice? STOP THINKING LIKE A LAW ABIDING CITIZEN AND START THINKING LIKE A CRIMINAL! As a multitude of UK newspaper articles repeatedly report, even brazen criminality (shop lifting, assault, etc) receives scant - if any - police attention nowadays. As long as you don't use the wrong pronouns, say that science is better than ideology or do 21 mph on a 20mph 3-lane motorway (amongst a few other things) then you should remain "under the radar" (so to speak). And, in the very temote possibility you DO get nicked, claim that what you did was "an integral part of your culture" and claim you ate being persecuted "because of your beliefs". At the worst you may end up with 2 hours of community service!

Which is why I avoid flying those airlines - short-haul or long haul. I do make an exception for the Swiss flight ZRH -LCY - principally for the top-not ground handling they afford Business Class passengers, which more than outweighs the less than amazing seating. Back when we had Swissair (remember them?), I had to urgently get from London to Genoa - and the only flights available were in First Class with Swissair via Zürich - that was a luxurious flight indeed. Unfortunately, hubris at the top of Swissair combined with a less than competitive business class service on long haul* and a rather poor choice of airline partners** led to the company's demise. I find Swiss sorta OK, but it's clear that Swiss is the unwanted stepchild of the Lufthansa group with many of the great routings out of Switzerland (e.g. BSL-LCY) being axed or re-routed via Munich or Frankfurt. * when BA (back when it was good) had first equipped its long haul fleet with lie-flat beds and loads of amenities in business class, these were still ONLY for first class passengers on Swissair. ** One of the airlines Swissair was partnered with was SABENA! Say No More!!!

Good Morning All, A rather unusual weekend for me inasmuch as I spent a goodly chunk of it building a 1/50 scale architectural model of the penthouse apartment we hope to buy. Based on the original architect‘s drawing and our visit, I was able to create a good facsimile of the floor pan. As mentioned before, we are selling off Schloss iD and moving to an apartment so we need to assess what of our furniture we can/will take with us. Thus the contents of Schloss iD have been catalogued and measured and everything is being recreated in 1/50 scale (I envisage much “frank and open discussions” with Mrs iD about what gets “recycled” and what goes with us). And if this particular flat doesn’t work out, then I’ll still have our furniture in miniature for the next candidate. There has been a bit of housing bubble ‘round here as of late and one that seems to have burst. But only for parts of the country. In the place where I live there has been (and is) a spate of apartment building as, suddenly, the town has become incredibly desirable, with a concomitant knock-on effect on house and apartment prices. A small (97m2) 2 room new build flat recently was advertised for about SFr 1.1 million (about £974,000). Eye watering no doubt, but still less than the equivalent in the desirable areas of Zürich or Geneva. For me, one of the pleasurable aspects of the move is the need to upgrade the audiovisual technology that we have. Exactly recreating the library/home cinema in any new place will be unlikely, so the existing projector will be retired and replaced by a UST one (UST = Ultra Short Throw). This will provide large screen audiovisuals whilst being very unobtrusive when not in use (especially when paired with a retractable/hideable screen). One of my pet “interior design” peeves is having the TV on display in the living area - dominating the space like a semi-malignant Cyclops. And it seems that I’m not the only one to feel that way - there are more than a few YouTube “how to hide your TV” videos - both of a DIY and “look at this” nature. Of course, the perfect solution is to have a dedicated home theatre - but not everyone has a spare room to turn into a home cinema - so a UST projector and a “hide-away” screen would be a great solution. And as much as I love new, cutting edge, technology I’m still not installing their apps on my smart phone…

I think that the mediarati and “delightful young things” in Islington would say that that kinda proves their point…..🤣🤣🤣

Nah… … Judge Dredd!

I most definitely agree there. The ingredients are superlative, the technical prowess of the chef’s exemplary and the dishes….. meh! Fortunately, albeit later than most of Europe, the Swiss-Germans are rediscovering some of the almost forgotten dishes of their great-grandparents and their great-great grandparents. Definitely rustic (involving easily available local ingredients: pig, potato, cabbage, eggs, milk, cheese, onions) they are frequently hearty stick-to-your-ribs stuff. Forget boring Züri Gschnätzlets mit rösti, Bündner Gerstensuppe from Graubünden or Cholera from the Wallis are much, much better. As for non-European food: forget it

I must unreservedly and unhesitatingly profusely apologise to @Dave Hunt, @Barry O, @jamie92208, @Grizz et al. It seems that I have been willfully, deliberately and egregiously mislead by my sophisticated and urbane acquaintances in Islington, Kensington and Hampstead! They vociferously insisted that, with the exception of parts of Bucks, north of the M25 there is nothing but an intellectual, cultural, social and culinary wasteland until you get to the approved bits of Jockland (basically Edinburgh and the more sanitary parts of the Highlands and the Isles). A part of the country which is a brutal, windswept and desolate area, populated by rude mechanicals and woad-daubed savages, bereft of any cultural and culinary merit. A population for whom "sophisticated" means putting dripping on a croissant - not bread, keeping coal in a scuttle and not in the bath, drinking lager instead of bitter and watching rugby union instead of rugby league. An area where, for the price of a shed in Islington, you can buy six or seven streets worth of back-to-back terrace houses. I now realise, thanks to the kind words of education of @Dave Hunt, @Barry O, @jamie92208, @Grizz et al., that Britain is more than Islington, delightful little 3-Michelin star tapas bars, amusing Gran Crus from "our little man who deals in wine", colourful "Gor-Blimey" Cockney "characters" and authentic Peruvian nose-flute concerts at the Royal Albert Hall.....

I thought that the distinction is that maps plot terrain, whilst charts plot bodies of water…

And I’m damned proud to be ageist. None of the staff in my little company is under 50 years of age - even our guard dogs (Lucy & Schotty) are over 50 in human years. Yoof? You can keep the spotty, self-entitled, whiny little *******

In regards to “eating out” outside of London, I suppose - if you stretch things a bit - you could claim that it’s “fusion” cuisine (UK + XXXX), such as… Baked bean and turkey twizzler lasagna Black pudding fried rice Battered sushimi and chips Treacle gelato Pizza en croute Caviar, crisps and iced vodka Spotted D1ck soufflé The mind boggles

In my case probably not… I can’t see any hiring manager announcing that the next candidate is Dr Scourge of God, Betrayer of Christendom, Satanic Blasphemer of the Occident, Flayer of Innocents, Vile Servant of Beezlebub, Destroyer of the True Faith iD PhD, DPharmMed etc. etc.

And outside of London it’s a desert - with oases few and far between… Certainly, you can get (pale imitations of) “ethnic food” (Asian, Indian [well, mostly Bangladeshi], Italian etc) but it’s nearly always what you could term “Hollywood Movie” food, as in “A Blockbuster Movie based on….” where the only thing that is actually original (authentic) is the name used…

The UK is notorious for being a low wage/salary*, high tax environment, Many years ago I applied for a position - senior to my then current position - at a biotech startup in London. I had thought that it would be a good career move and - in the days pre-dog - I would have had a pied-à-terre in London and then commuted back to Switzerland every other weekend. The necessary experience and qualifications fitted, as did the interpersonal stuff, then they talked about salary: they were offering 80% of my then existing salary for a much more senior role. I asked if they were having a larf (actually I phrased it as "would this be the starting point for salary and bonus discussions?") and they said No, that was the maximum they were prepared to pay. I politely declined to go further (later I learned that the company went nowhere, fast. So I might have dodged a bullet there). I am still occasionally contacted by UK headhunters - often for short term work - and always they offer insultingly low rates**. Usually when I get to "my minimum fee, as paid by my other clients, is CHF XXXXX" they find an excuse to hang up pretty toot sweet. * outside of certain individuals of the media, banking, sport and law. ** I think that the rates that the customer they are working for is willing to pay would be in line with the "standard" fee structures for what I do - but it seems that they want to trouser at least half of those fees...

A lot depends on for what the purpose of the kitchen is: many of the kitchen designs that I have seen (here, in the US, in the UK, and in Germany) are definitely first for impressing friends, relatives, and the neighbours, and second (and sometimes a very distant second) for cooking in. I recall one episode of the Grand Designs TV programme, where the people building this rather hideous looking, designed-to-win-architectural-awards new build home installed a £100,000 kitchen. Yes, you read it right: a £100,000 kitchen. For that sort of money, I could install a state of the art professional kitchen of a standard necessary in a Michelin starred kitchen and still have a big wodge of dosh left over (probably half, if not more). The latest wheeze is to have a video camera inside your “high tech“, all-singing, all-dancing oven which can send pictures of the oven contents to an app on your smart phone. Now, unless you are a witch with a regular habit of sticking small children into the oven (as in Hansel and Gretel), I see no point in such an undoubtably expensive bit of useless frippery. I might have mentioned that Mrs iD has finally persuaded me to move into a flat and we are currently looking at two possibilities: one, a garden apartment in a brand new building that will be built beginning of the summer (and ready for habitation early in 2025) and the other an existing penthouse apartment which is a few years old and needs refurbishment of the kitchen. Unfortunately, in both cases whilst Mrs iD is perfectly happy for me to install professional equipment where possible and feasible, she is dead set against having stainless steel drawers, cupboards and work surfaces. Why we “need“/“must have” veneered, painted or enamelled fronts in the kitchen is beyond me… Must be an XX chromosome thing…

Depends upon who you read: https://www.bathroomcity.co.uk/blog/close-toilet-lid-before-flushing or https://microbiologysociety.org/news/society-news/does-putting-the-lid-down-when-flushing-the-toilet-really-make-a-difference.html. Within a household, it really doesn't make a difference - chances are that you will already have been infected with the same microbes as your partner/other family member(s). Given that every person's immune system is different. all parties within a household can be infected and be fully symptomatic, asymptomatic or someplace in between - all together. Whilst hygiene (and - in the appropriate situations - asepsis) is always important, often vital and sometimes critical, ultimately it comes down to how good your immune system is....

Might've done, might've done.....

That’s always a good one (I recently conducted a series of “mock“ interviews for people completing some degree work at UCL and I used this on every single candidate. All but one barely bumbled their way through an answer to the question). This question teases out more than a few things, such as Have they taken the time to learn a bit about the company and its structure. Do they have a realistic view of their own abilities Do they have a realistic view about career progression. When I worked for The Company With Deep Pockets, I frequently interviewed candidates and mostly did the lunchtime interview (where I interviewed them over lunch in the Director’s Restaurant). As always I was genial, friendly, courteous, polite, attentive and well mannered and yet totally merciless with my questioning. People who I had interviewed and went on to be hired, later told me that my lunchtime interview was probably the most brutal and exhausting interview of the lot. Apparently, it was incredibly unnerving when I put down my knife and fork,, stopped chewing, swallowed and gave them my full attention! Like Terry Pratchett’s Lord Vetinari, I practiced the deadly skill of <aggressive listening>* 🤣😁 * I may have even raised an eyebrow once or twice… 😁