Has anyone seen Scott? He's the tubby man who came to our house on Saturday, offering to clean the windows. Busy fellow. He had a whole team of people in the street. Naturally, I'm not one to be taken in, so I told him to come back in an hour and then forgot about it. There he was again, just before his men were due to reach the Citizen's Advice Bureau on the corner.
Having produced the money, I could then only agree that it would be very convenient if he returned in a month's time. If I paid in advance, we wouldn't even need to be in. And so Scott and I walked to the cashpoint together, having what was to me an insightful conversation about the world of a window-cleaning entrepreneur.
Since then, strangely, our windows have not been cleaned. Nor, I suspect, have anyone else's. I've been trying to look on the £80 of which I'm now short as a charitable donation. In an attempt to recoup some of the money, I didn't lash out on a white loaf to make bread sauce that evening, but, instead, used some stale hotcross buns. Many of the greatest cuisines of the world are born out of the peasant need to economise. What chance of my bread sauce becoming a classic?
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Graham Norton's elegant East London home hits the market, and it's just as wonderful as you would expectThe four-bedroom home in Wapping should be studied for how well it uses two separate spaces to create a home of immense character and utility.
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Sign of the times: In the age of the selfie, what’s happening to the humble autograph?When Ringo Starr announced that he was no longer going to sign anything, he kickstarted a celebrity movement that coincided with the advent of the camera phone and selfie. Rob Crossan asks whether, in today’s world, the selfie holds more clout than an autograph?
