1. It will cost more than you think.
2. It will cost more than you have.
3. Presenters of property programmes will usually know more about property and building than the people appearing on the show.
4. People appearing on the show will usually ignore any and all advice given by the presenter (or their builder … or their architect).
5. It will take longer than you think. (This is especially true if your plan is dependent on good weather … in the UK … in November.)
6. Doing things yourself may save money but will rarely save time.
7. Living on-site is always a Bad Idea.
8. Not visiting the site regularly to manage contractors is a Bad Idea.
9. There will always be a problem with the structure of the building that cannot be seen until work starts. (If it’s a period property or listed building, this will immediately double your costs and amount of time required … at least.)
10. I will ignore any and all of the above lessons when it comes to working on my own home.

I try to avoid politics on this blog but having spent today in a building round the corner from the Bank of England and the G20 protests I do have a couple of things that I’d like to say to some of the parties involved. Before I do, it is worth mentioning that lack of sleep and an excess of caffeine have left me a little on the grumpy side today!

Protestors – please don’t put questions on your placards. Especially ones like “Why do we have to pay?” and “How am I supposed to feed my kids?”. It took great strength of will to walk past without answering them and you really wouldn’t have liked my answers.

Bankers – if you’re wearing jeans instead of a suit to try and blend in with the protestors, you shouldn’t really wear them with expensive designer shirts, jumpers and shoes; you weren’t exactly inconspicuous.

Politicians – stopping in front of a handy camera crew to shake hands with the police officers keeping an eye on the peaceful protestors is just cheap; you know who you are.

Metropolitan Police – Operation Glencoe? Seriously? I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’re just working your way through a list of Scottish glens and that this was in no way a reference to a slaughter of innocents by government forces. You can see why that might be a bad parallel to draw, right? Right?

Now that I’ve got all that off my chest, here are some pretty pictures of my walk home through Greenwich Park.

The Royal Observatory:

A weirdly blue-tinged view over the Maritime Museum towards Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs:

I love Spring!

I hate knitting sleeves. No, really, I hate knitting sleeves. I don’t mind acres of stocking stitch in the bodies of jumpers but, for some reason, knitting plain sleeves really, really bores me.

I think it is because sleeves feel like they should be quick to knit; after all, the rows are much shorter than body rows. But, no matter how quickly they are going, I always think they should be going faster.

I’ve discovered that the only way I can get through sleeve-knitting with any of my sanity intact is to adopt a Zen approach: the less I care about how much of the sleeve I’ve knitted, the more of the sleeve will have been knitted. Unfortunately, the only way for me to achieve a mind-state where I’m not measuring the sleeve length every five minutes is to distract my mind from my knitting entirely, usually by way of watching a favourite DVD.

The reason for this rant? I’ve finished knitting the body of my Katje and I’m in the process of knitting the sleeves. So, last night, I sat down with my knitting and Blackpool (warning: spoilers^*) on DVD and managed to get the rest of the first sleeve finished. (Apologies, as always, for the scary headless web-cam photos but I am supposed to be studying today!)

One down, one to go!

* Spoilers doesn’t really cover it. The warning should really say “BBC have decided to summarise entire plot of series, including how every plot thread turns out, in four paragraphs.”

One of the more fun things that my Mum asked for for her scrapbook was a set of close-up pictures of my wedding bouquet and I realised that I hadn’t really blogged about my wedding flowers till now.

My bouquet, my bridesmaid’s bouquet and the groom and best man’s buttonholes were custom ordered from the wonderful Princess Lasertron. I just told her, rather vaguely, what colours I wanted and what my budget was and she came up with the perfect arrangements.

A picture of all the flowers in action:

The buttonholes couldn’t have matched Helen and Steven’s outfits any more closely, which considering they were made thousands of miles away without ever seeing the outfits still amazes me. The browns and creams in Nicki’s bouquet were really elegant and I just absolutely adore the pinks in mine!

The best thing about these flowers, for me, is that I get to keep them forever without them withering or dying.

Here are some of the close-ups of my bouquet that I took for my Mum’s scrapbook:

including my new favourite picture of my wedding shawl:

A close-up of Steven’s buttonhole:

I don’t have any close-ups of Nicki’s bouquet, unfortunately, since it’s at my Mum’s house but hopefully she’ll send me the ones that my Dad took for the scrapbook.

On the days when it is not pouring with rain, I walk along the Thames from London Bridge to the Tower of London on my way to work. I enjoy the walk along the river, particularly since it is one of those areas in London that is surprisingly quiet even when the rest of the city is bustling.

It also means I get to see some interesting sights: Tower Bridge being raised to allow a tall ship or a steamboat underneath; a luxury cruise liner incongruously moored alongside HMS Belfast; Rainbow Warrior moored outside the Tower of London.

I think my favourite might be the vision that greeted me this morning; a polar bear on a ice floe being towed upriver.

Unfortunately it was too sunny for me to get a photo and I haven’t seen any mention on the news yet but I’ll keep looking.

Edited: The BBC has a picture.

Tonight is Burns Night, the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns. In fact, this year is the 250th anniversary.

Traditionally, Burns suppers are held round about this time. Friends get together, eat, drink, recite poetry, sing and generally make merry. Steven and I were invited to a Burns supper that some friends of ours were throwing last night and I wanted to take something traditional with us since we were going to be nearly the only Scots there. Since I’m completely incapable of making edible shortbread, I decided to make some tablet to take with us. (I’ve got about a 50/50 strike rate for tablet but it’s still more likely to turn out well than shortbread.)

Tablet is a type of Scottish confectionery that is a bit like a grainy fudge but even more sugary. I use this recipe, which works perfectly if I follow the recipe exactly and fails miserably when I don’t.

Hence, on Saturday this:

became this:

Not much of it got eaten last night but I have been nibbling away at it ever since. Fortunately, we have friends coming to stay with us for a couple of days to help us eat the rest!

This post is going to be mainly pictures with very few words since my brain is still a little overwhelmed with all the wonderful memories.

Firstly, we had absolutely beautiful weather. There were a couple of rain showers but considering that we were in Scotland in November, it was really dry and mild.

I was awake very early so sat and knitted while I watched the sun come up. You can’t really see it in this picture but I’m working on one of my Leyburn socks, of which I now have one and a half.

Then came the preparation: hair, makeup, little bit of champagne.

The ceremony went well and I managed not to cry. Since I’ve cried all the way through every other wedding I’ve been to, this was quite an achievement!

Nicki and Helen both looked gorgeous and we both really appreciated their help and support both before, during and after the day.

After the ceremony, we went outside for drinks and photographs and for Steven and I to be pelted with confetti.

The Myrtle leaf shawl matched my dress perfectly, especially considering that I bought the yarn online without having seen it in person and not having seen my dress for three months either.

Then we went inside where there were tables with origami centrepieces:

and cupcakes with origami flowers on the top cake:

Steven and I danced

and since we had forgotten to tell the band that we didn’t want the rest of the wedding party to join us for the first dance, the best man and bridesmaid were invited up to join us:

Fortunately, Nicki and Helen were excellent sports and, from what I could see, spent most of the dance in fits of laughter.

Then there was some more dancing,

followed by even more dancing

and then everyone went home.

Steven’s blog.

We had a fantastic day and I’ll post more details, stories and pictures when we get back from honeymoon.

In the first lecture I attended on probability at university, the lecturer tried an experiment with us to show us how badly human beings understand and estimate probability. He asked us to do one of two things, toss a coin 50 times and write down the results or write down a series of results that could have come from tossing a coin 50 times. Meanwhile, he left the room for 10 minutes. When he returned, he asked people to show him their results and, in every case, he could tell from looking at the written results whether the person had actually tossed a coin or whether they had just written down some results.

The reason for this is that Nature is far more random than people think it is. For example, a coin landing on the same side 5 times in a row during 50 tosses is actually quite likely. However, this looks ‘wrong’ to people so they would never write this down as a possible series of results (unless they’ve encountered this experiment before!).

Similarly, people tend to notice and remember things that reinforce their world-view, the difference between the glass being half-empty and the glass being half-full.

The reason that I mention all of this is that I’m trying to convince myself that I haven’t been experiencing a run of unusually bad luck recently. Firstly, using the results of the first experiment, just because it feels like an unusually long run of bad things, doesn’t mean that it’s in anyway significant and things will probably balance themselves out in the end. Secondly, because bad things have been happening, I’m more likely to notice the bad things and dismiss good things as irrelevant when they do happen.

I should point out that nothing seriously bad has happened. I more appear to be the living embodiment of Murphy’s Law, in that anything that can go wrong has. Now, some of these things are in some way my fault, like getting on the wrong train and being 40 minutes late meeting Steven after work; some of them are at least partially Steven’s fault, like the car battery being flat so that I had to bring my wedding dress home from central London by public transport and some of them are just things that happened, like sitting on chewing gum on my way to a course last Monday morning.

I had decided this weekend that I was going to stop complaining about the world being out to get me and just get on with life while waiting for these things to stop happening.

Then I tried to get into work early this morning.

First, I got on a train, which travelled to the next station where it stopped and an announcement was made that it was going to be held indefinitely since a passenger had been taken ill. So I got off the train. As I made my way along the platform to switch to the Docklands Light Railway instead, they suddenly announced that the train was leaving, shut the doors and left. Undeterred, I decided to stick with my plan to take the DLR since there had been various other problems with mainline trains this morning. I get to the DLR station, get on a train, it leaves and three stations down the line they announce that the station I want to go to has been closed because of a security alert, the train will be stopping at a station that is still a couple of miles from where I need to get to and that I should change at Canary Wharf to get the Underground. So, I change at Canary Wharf, can’t get on the first Underground train that comes because there’s no space but get on the second one without having to wait too long. That travels almost all the way to the next station where it is announced that there are going to be severe delays to the journey because of a passenger being taken ill on another train.

Now, I realise that Londoners like to complain about transport and I’m certainly proving no exception to the stereotype but I live 6 miles from the office and what is usually a 45 minute trip took 2 hours. I could have walked it in that time.

The only rational explanation is that the world really is out to get me and until someone can convince me otherwise I’m going to go hide under a rock.

I’m sure the weekends used to be longer than they are now. With my exams over, wedding planning is in full swing so weekends are even busier than work-days.

This weekend was spent like this:

These are our gorgeous wedding invitations, as designed by Steven’s sister. Between finding a pen that worked and persuading our inkjet printer to put the addresses in the right place on the envelopes, it took a while but they were all posted this morning.

Now that they’re posted, I can link to our wedding website. I can’t take credit for the design, which I butchered from our invitation design but it was fun doing some proper coding again.

More knitting news to come!