Thread 19 - TalkLair: "The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long"

[Kucinghitam]

(Previous thread 18)

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat...

In the TalkLair, the fairy lights are festooned on the mantlepiece, the tree is twinkling with baubles, the mince pies are in the oven, the MN legendary chicken is ready to feed the hordes. The denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics. We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

I don't see why you shouldn't hand-wash it. It seems a lot safer than dry-cleaning, frankly, and, and I always have. This page goes into it in some detail:
www.derek-rose.com/blogs/the-rose-lounge/silk-care-guide derek-rose.com/blogs/the-rose-lounge/silk-care-guide (I've taken off the www. to avoid bloody great photos coming up on the thread.)

That's quite an amusing website, btw. I especially like the women's pyjamas for a mere £715.

The prices on those pyjamas!

Thanks for the advice link, Gonners. I'm glad to say that was what I was going to do, though I've decided to put it off until a warmer day. Maybe Thursday.

Only £715 Gonners? Pfft, I think I'll buy a spare pair.

We need a reaction button for £715 pyjamas!

fingers crossed for a full refund Kuc.

I’ve just been in China and Japan, and those posh loos were everywhere except in one (newish) Japanese station, where there were … smelly holes in the ground with foothold things.

I definitely appreciated the warm seat that you got with every one of the electric toilets, and the lid popping up as you approached that you got with some. Also, in Japan most hotels provide guests with clean pyjamas/nightshirt every night. Very civilised.

I have only really had one nightmare train journey, in 1999, Great Yarmouth to Newcastle, on what they said was the worst day ever to travel by rail. The NE Mainline had 25 mph restrictions.

10 am, Yarmouth to Norwich, half an hour waiting for a bus to Mildenhall, which is two open platforms - no walls - with a shelter for about 6 people, so the other 194 of us had no chance. After an hour of standing in driving sleet, the train on the other platform (present before we arrived) shunted 100 yards and swapped to our platform.

Changed at Ely for Peterborough, for a delayed service. Crawled up to the Northeast. My aunt collected me from Durham at 10:30, as it would have got to Newcastle at midnight.

They'd run out of all food and drink before Doncaster!

@SinnerBoy To look on the bright side, though, you could have been stuck in Great Yarmouth.

Haha!

One of my BiLs lives there (his wife's family are from there), I'm only mildly ashamed to say that we've not visited since the Brexit vote! (And only very rarely before that).

Work since I got back from holiday has been rather a shitshow, today culminating in the CRM system falling over under the pressure. I wish I was back in Korea!

Speaking of which, we assembled a list of "South Korea things" that we found interesting and/or wonderful there. I won't dump them all in one post, but might do a themed set.

Firstly, the public transport, e.g. the metro, trains and buses.

1. Some bus stops have heated bench seats.
2. Some bus stops have wireless phone charging pads.
3. Many of the busiest train stations and metro stations leave the barriers open because they trust passengers to have paid.
4. We never had to show our tickets at any point, from entering the station, to leaving at our destination, to use the bullet train. It was simply trusted that we had tickets and that we had seated ourselves in the correct seats.
5. When the metro trains are about to arrive in station, a happy little fanfare plays. Varies by line/station - some had a regal trumpet fanfare, some of the beach stops had seagull calls.
6. The public safety videos that played on repeat in the metro stations and on the trains are just wonderful 💗 I found a couple of examples on Youtube.

Those are brilliant, @Kucinghitam ... it seems as though the Koreans actually care about public safety. That sort of thing would never happen here - though to be fair it probably wouldn't work here either, as we'd panic anyway, so why bother?

Those videos are great!

Going back to the high tech toilets though, my mum, whose spends a lot of time on the loo and feels the cold, doesn’t fancy a warm toilet seat but wants a lid that heats up when it’s up so that it warms your back when you’re on the loo. Possibly such a thing exists in east Asia.

Ooh, can we have both?

I became very fond of the heated toilet seats, also many of them had automatic flush - when you sit down it makes a happy little beep, then when you stand up another grateful beep, then flushhhhh

In fact the public toilet provision was amazing. Lovely sparkling clean loos everywhere. Even halfway up a forested hill in the middle of a rustic park, nothing but trees, birds and the footpath. You see a small neat shack. One section for men, one for women. Clean, well-lit, plenty of toilet roll, soap. And soothing Korean classical music playing.

Unrelated photos of the surreal tumuli of Gyeongju.

That sounds wonderful. I know we don't have heated toilet seats, but I wish things were still like that here and were at least clean and well kept.

Funnily enough in Japan while there were generally lovely clean public toilets, with the automatic loos with warmed seats, there was often no soap or anything to dry your hands on/with. You can buy tiny attractive decorative hand towels in their wonderful department stores for you to take with you (I did). I didn’t notice any classical music, though I did hear some fantastic western jazz and pop, including from the 1960s that I was not aware of having heard before in shops and cafés. I now have much cooler playlists in Apple Music.

Most of the Korean loos had blue soap sort of impaled on a stick by each sink

On parks and nature:
Of course there were plenty of paved or gravelled paths in the gardens and parks; but where we might have just bare earth footpaths here, they had woven coir paths, like walking on carpet! Rather wonderful and DH wants to replace our lawn with it.
They love their old trees and have all manner of poles and supports to hold up sagging branches, then there's the next level where the trunk is getting split or weak - they fill the trunks with cement, beautifully sculpted to follow the shape of the tree.

(Example pics, not mine)

I've heard the same concrete method for old trees is used in France. Don't think I've seen it here.

I think that would look better if they dyed the cement to match the bark. As it is, it looks a bit like a rather grubby and ill-groomed penguin. Fun, though!

Really like the coir paths.

Colouring the concrete to match the bark would make it blend in but I think I prefer it being its own unapologetic self while supporting the tree. I like the functionality of it.

To be truly Japanese shouldn't it be gold? A bit extravagant, thoughbut.

That’s the sort of thing Andy Goldsworthy would do, only using leaves, like in the final image here:

https://aestheticsofjoy.com/giveaway-winner-andy-goldsworthys-leaves/

I love Andy Goldsworthy's work, it's beautiful. My brother gave me one of his books for my 40th birthday and I still get it out to look at the pictures.

Me too! We’re going to Hanging Stones next month and I’m sooo looking forward to it. https://hangingstones.org/the-walk/

Love Andy Goldsworthy's work.