At home

If you have the impression that I only read Agatha Christie's books, well, you're wrong.

It was brilliant reading At home by Bill Bryson just as I was watching Downton Abbey... it almost felt as the book was written to accompany the series!

Otherwise it's a typical Bryson book: lots of interesting stuff if you find it interesting. Not everything is 100% correct but that doesn't even matter because it is entertaining. Although in principle the book is about our homes and things that go on in specific parts of the house, you know how Bryson's mind works... From Crystal Palace to probability distributions in just a few pages. I learned that Norwegians renamed a lake to export more ice, that Black Adder's episode "Ink and Incapability" is based on a true story, that only aspidistra was immune to ill effects of the gas, who Jethro Tull and Palladio really were, what a ha-ha is etc.

In a book with almost 500 pages, of course plenty of interesting quotes can be found, here are a few:
- "... that's really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things."
- "We have no idea - or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don't know if any of them are right."
- "Households had servants the way modern people have appliances."
- "... items of clothing made of different types of fabric - of velvet and lace, say - often had to be carefully taken apart, washed separately, then sewn back together again."
- "The invention of the light bulb was a wondrous thing but of not much practical use when no one had a socket to plug it into."
- "Columbus's real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions."
 -"... university courses in the history of marketing really ought to begin with British opium sales ..."
- "The Eiffel Tower wasn't just the largest thing that anyone had ever proposed to build, it was the largest completely useless thing."
- "... If you wash lousy clothing at low temperatures, all you get is cleaner lice."
- "... that among these new people [Cro-Magnons] was some ingenious soul who came up with one of the greatest, most underrated inventions in history: string."

And since we're talking about home, here's a quick update on our future home :-)