Prepare to be Awed

I am getting a late start this morning, given that I didn't wake up until almost 8 a.m.! We were out a bit later than usual last night in order to allow the cleaners to do their thing in our flat. More about that in a moment.

First, yesterday began dramatically when I was walking Olga in the morning. Down the street there were about eight magpies all squawking and chattering from rooftops and aerials surrounding one front garden. (Magpies are VERY LOUD when they want to be.) I thought, "There must be a cat down there." But I looked and instead saw a hawk, sitting on the garden wall and eating a bird. I don't know whether that bird was a magpie, or the magpies were simply offended by the hawk's presence, but they sure were making a racket.

I tried to take a picture but they were across the street from me and I only had my phone, and I didn't want to get closer with Olga for fear of scaring the hawk away. I couldn't get a shot that looked like anything.

Nature, red in tooth and claw.

I wrapped Dave's Christmas presents. Don't they look good? I found that wrapping paper discarded in a trash pile around the corner after last Christmas -- an unused roll -- and salvaged it. So, yeah, that's free wrapping paper. I can't complain.

Finally, last night -- the cleaners. I say "night" but they really showed up at 5 p.m., so evening is a better word. They were a man and woman, and they didn't speak English -- I think they were Russian, as Dave said he heard Mrs Russia from upstairs chatting with them on the front porch. Dave and I had already worked out that we weren't going to ask them to move the houseplants, which are huge and numerous, because I didn't want the plants damaged and I'd already cleaned around them.

So we asked them to do all the baseboards, the molding, the tops of pictures, the kitchen cabinets, the doors -- places that I often don't think to clean myself. They were also going to vacuum and mop and do the bathrooms and all the normal stuff one would do when cleaning.

Then we went out to dinner at a modern French restaurant called Riviera down by St. James' Palace. I had two martinis to blast from my mind the fact that two perfect strangers were rooting around in our house. The martinis were very effective.

When we got home, I was prepared to be awed. Professional cleaners, right? I thought we'd walk in and go, "Wow! I never realized how much I'd been missing when I cleaned! This place looks AMAZING!"

Instead, we walked in and said, "Oh."

Because it looked pretty much the same. In fact Dave was quite annoyed because he felt they missed some spots. He wanted to leave a negative review but I urged him to just let it go. This has all been a learning experience and what we've learned is that we are (I am) quite capable of cleaning our own flat.

The baseboards DO look a lot better, I'll give them that.

As requested, here's a shot of my new shirt from the Bahamas via an East Dulwich thrift store. Sushi, anyone?

(Top photo: Camberwell, on the way home from Linda Sue's on Tuesday.)