More than generous for two adults.
Double for four or five.
Use electric hand mixer to combine then add optional extras
Don’t do it! Don’t move house. Don’t move flat! It’s so painful!
In particular, don’t leave rented accommodation. Everyone knows that estate agents are sharks – estate agents and used car salesmen: they’re as bad as each other.
Our experience of leaving Marina Heights, where we spent 9 happy months:
We vacated the place on Monday 7th December. Our contract said that we needed to return it cleaned to a ‘professional standard’. We’re not sure exactly what that means but we spent the preceding Saturday and Sunday cleaning the place like it had never been cleaned before. It was immaculate – which is more than can be said for the state of it when we arrived. The check-in report for when we entered the place indicated that one of the toilets still needed cleaning, several light-bulbs needed replacing. It failed to mention that the oven needed cleaning – as we discovered about a week later with smoke pouring into the room and setting off alarms.
Anyway, on the day we left, an ”independent” inventory agent inspected the place (yes, technically independent as in not working for the same company as the estate agent, but employed by the estate agent, and knows where his next meal is coming from). After commenting on microscopic scratches you could just see if you got your head right down to the table at the right angle in the right light (a really crappy table too – worth no more than 5 pounds at a car boot sale) he directed his attention to the mirror in the hallway and, again by getting the angle just right, was able to see some smudges on the glass. When we said that these were hardly relevant, he just held up his hands and said that he’s independent and “just reports what he sees”.In short, he was looking for problems.
The report that we received a couple of days later highlighted various such things – none of which compared with the diabolical state of the carpets that desperately need replacing, the cracks in the walls that need attention, the toilet seats that our incoming report said were in desperate need of replacement.
Anyway, the letting agent then sent us an email asking us for the invoice for the professional cleaning which we got done. This was an issue as they still had our 2000+ pound deposit, and the contract we had signed said that if they needed to get someone in to clean the place, the minimum fee was going to be 235 pounds. We responded that the contract didn’t require us to pay someone – it merely said that we should ensure that the place was cleaned to a professional standard, and that we would dispute any claim they made.
Now, here’s the bit you need to know for when you vacate your own apartment: In the UK, under the Housing Act (2004) landlords are required to return the tenant’s deposit or indicate to the tenant that they wish to claim some of it within 10 working days (or perhaps 14 calendar days – I found references to both) of the tenancy being terminated. So, after our initial response to the estate agents saying that we would dispute any charges, we didn’t contact them again, and hoped that they would forget about us. The 10th working day (we left on Mon 7th Dec, so Mon 21st Dec) was a bit exciting, but passed without them contacting us. So that night, we sent them an email as follows:
It has now been more than 14 days since we vacated the property and we have received neither our deposit nor notification of your intention to claim any of it. As you are doubtless aware, under current legislation the landlord is required to either return the deposit or notify the tenant of any intention to withhold the deposit within 10 working days of the tenancy being terminated. Those ten working days expired on Monday 21st December.
The return of our deposit is now overdue. Please return it forthwith to the bank account nominated in our previous email.
We sent this on the Monday evening. It didn’t get a response on Tuesday. On Wednesday morning we faxed a copy of the same email to them (point of faxing: we want a record of every correspondence so that if this ever goes to court or arbitration we can prove our side of the story). We got our deposit back the same day.
Lessons from this story:
This is an absolute winner!
If doing double-layer, do 50% more.
This is an ultra-cheap, easy, yet surprisingly tasty recipe. We seem to have this at least once each week.
For four people you’ll need:
Total time from start to finish: about 2 minutes more than the time it takes to cook the pasta as you can do most of the preparation while the pasta is cooking.
This is a fantastic unbaked cheesecake.
To be honest, it’s a bit boring to make because it’s so easy, but on the plus side … it’s so easy!
The trick with chocolate cake, and our excuse for making more of them, is experimenting with how much of the flour can be replaced with cocoa without the cake losing structural integrity.
In principle, the cake is just a version of a standard Victoria Sponge cake (equal weight of egg, butter, sugar, and self-raising flour). Now, your average chocolate cake maker will foolishly suggest adding a tablespoon or two of cocoa powder. We have found that replacing more than half of the flour with cocoa and you’ll start to have problems (think about it – flour mixed with water has a very different consistency from cocoa mixed with water), but you can just about get away with that – certainly a third of the flour can be replaced with cocoa although you might need to add a bit more baking powder to replace the self-raising flour.
We found a great recipe for crispy duck at Video Jug – qutie a good site for all sorts of “how-to” type stuff. For the proper how-to video see this link.
But the ingredients are shown below:
This is an absolutely fantastic pumpkin soup found at Waitrose
Serves 4 genously
Place the cream and chopped basil in a small pan and heat gently. Serve the soup in bowls with the basil cream swirled over the top and sprinkled with freshly ground black pepper, and with crusty granary bread on the side.
30 December 2013
Derin has started reading.
It’s only in the past week or so that he has started talking coherently (to us). A couple of days ago he was in our bed early in the morning on a work day (he had woken too late to go back to sleep, but too early to ignore) and Sheb had got up. He was sitting in the bed and when she came into the room he patted the mattress beside him and said “Mummy, come bed. Night night.” That was 3-4 days ago.
Now today he has shown that he can read numbers. It started with something earlier today – can’t remember what right now – where he said “Five. Five” and there was a “5” on a bottle/box/label. Then this evening when Bruce was brushing Derin’s teeth Derin started pointing at a Listerine mouth wash bottle and saying “Six. Six. Six” On checking, it turned out that the label said “6 benefits” or something.
It’s crazy late – now after 10pm, but we did a quick test a few minutes ago, writing numbers on his whiteboard, and he knows 4, 5, 6, 7. He said “nine” for “2”. Unfortunately it was too late for more testing. He was too tired. Strangely, the 5, 6, 7 were said in English, with Bruce writing the numbers. When Sheb wrote “4” he said “dort” (“four”). Is this a coincidence? We don’t know… yet.
Interesting though that his first word was “bir” (“one”), his first coherent string of words was “one, two, three, …, ten”, and the first characters that he can read were “5” and “6”
More experiments tomorrow!
Derin started counting properly today. (30 December 2013)
Until now he has been saying numbers to himself or repeating after us, but this evening we were at Rich & Ali’s and Sheb was sticking magnets to the fridge and he was counting them “one, two, three” etc as she put them on. Then when she started him off in Turkish he carried on counting in Turkish.
In English he could count all the way to ten. In Turkish he could get to 8 (“sekiz”) but couldn’t remember 9 (“dokuz”), so he skips that and goes straight to 10 (“on”).