A couple of times a month, I take the coach to Oxford. London-door-to-Oxford-door, taking the coach takes around two hours.

Travelling back to London one weekend, I had a dream run home. The coach trip went smoothly, arriving at Baker Street London in 75 minutes.

Within a minute of waiting at the Baker Street bus stop, my local bus arrived. The local bus carried me all the way to my home bus stop without stopping once. This is very unusual as this is well-patronised bus route.

Then as I walked home from the bus stop, every pedestrian crossing flashed green for ‘walk’.

With such a series of good fortune, I was home in less than 90 minutes.

When Tube workers went on strike in June, I was completely unaffected. Once again, I rejoiced in my living arrangements, particularly the 20 minute walk between home and work.

There was one aspect of the strike that did cause a twinge of envy. The London Cycling Campaign ran ‘BikeTubes’ over the two strike days. Experienced and novice cyclists joined together to travel en masse along designated routes, thus forming the cycling equivalent of a tube line.

I live too close to work for any of the BikeTube routes to be useful, which is a shame because I really enjoyed the one crowd cycling event I’ve been on.

The BikeTubes were so successful that they are now a permanent fixture on Transport for London‘s calendar. Cycle Fridays allow new cyclists to experiment with riding into work in the safe company of trained marshals from the London Cycling Campaign.

Last Friday as I waited to cross the road to get to work, I saw a BikeTube of people go past me. It looked fun.

I have been signing off my emails with ‘cheerio’ since long before I arrived in the UK. According to my email archive, I first used ‘cheerio’ on 18 May 2003. I use it to sign off personal email, and at work with people I’ve met or talked to more than a couple of times.

I can’t remember why I started using it. I like ‘cheerio’ a lot. It sounds friendly — a bit cute, a bit cheerful. I imagine myself doing a little wave, as I hit ‘send’.

Two weekends ago, I read an article that said that the email sign off ‘cheers’ is too casual.

Then ‘cheerio’ must be even more so. I’ve always supposed some people think it’s overly cute but I never worried about it until now. (The article also said that ‘cheers’ is faux British, which is a criticism we here can ignore.)

So I started thinking about other email closing options. While I like the balance of formality and friendliness in ‘best’, I can’t use it because I have a thing about grammar. Closing with an adjective is just a bit strange to me.

I use ‘best regards’ for my professional correspondence. It is too formal to replace ‘cheerio’. By that same token, ‘sincerely’, ‘kind regards’, ‘faithfully’ and ‘cordially’ are similarly discounted.

‘Yours’ and ‘warmly’ is too intimate.

No sign off is sometimes too abrupt.

Perhaps my correspondents haven’t noticed, but I haven’t used ‘cheerio’ since 10 August, except for a single slip up on the 17th.

Instead I’ve been rotating, as appropriate, the following pool of closing salutations:

• Nothing — good for short emails as part of a longer discussion
• ‘Thanks’ and ‘thanks again’ — always works for emails in which you ask for a favour
• ‘Hope that helps’ — responding to other people’s emails that end in ‘thanks’.
• ‘See you soon’, ‘talk soon’ — especially when you’re arranging a meeting or follow up call
• ‘Hope the rest of your day is less frantic’ — or some other set of well wishes that reflect a person’s current state
• ‘Hope you’re well’ — good for people you haven’t been in contact with for a while
• ‘Bye’ — this is, of course, quirky because it is so classic so I use it only occasionally

So many options, which were once swept up in the single phrase of ‘cheerio’!

What it means is that I have to spend more time thinking now when I close my email.

Two weeks ago, Daniel visited us from his base in Amsterdam. Daniel and Damjan are ‘foodies’ and I like food, so we booked ourselves into Gordon Ramsay’s flagship restaurant on Royal Hospital Road in Chelsea.

We spent five hours there (7pm to 1am) on a Tuesday night. The artistically plated dishes were full great flavours and textures. The wait staff read our minds.

Daniel has a review and photos on his website so I now direct you there…

I like putting things in boxes and categories. I have mental boxes such as:

• fruit vs vegetable
• sweet vs savoury

I feel uncomfortable when things drift between mental boxes. This is why I am considerably concerned about tomato based drinks. To me, drinks are in the ‘sweet’ box, as opposed to soups, which are generally ‘savoury’.

A tomato drink is not hot enough to be a soup and not sweet enough to be a drink, so I find it confusing.

Recently, I had a mental box problem to do with rhubarb. Damjan’s housemate, Niall, went to visit Nick. Nick gave Niall some home-grown rhubarb. Niall re-gifted it to Damjan, as everyone knows that Damjan likes to experiment with cooking the less common veggies.

Damjan and I pored over a number of candidate recipes: rhubarb and orange mousse and rhubarb fool. We finally settled on a monstrous hybrid of both: orange rhubarb fool with ice-cream.

We stewed the rhubarb with brown sugar, adding freshly squeezed orange juice and grated ginger. Then we dollaped it onto vanilla ice cream and served it with fresh ripe and sweet strawberries.

What a dessert! It was very delicious, tart and sweet, soft but textured.

Even as I enjoyed my dessert, I was feeling tense because of a mental box scramble. Rhubarb is a vegetable. I can’t go around eating vegetables for dessert.

The only solution, I have decided, is to reclassify rhubarb into my mental ‘fruit’ box. Such reclassifications are not unprecedented. For my whole life, tomatoes and cucumbers have been happily sitting in the veggie box, despite being fruits.

But this particular mental switch (rhubarb as fruit) has been more difficult than I expected. The problem is that rhubarb looks like celery, and there is nothing more vegetably than celery.

If I keep at it, I am sure I will get around this mental block. I know it is possible because after a short struggle, one of my favourite desserts is now carrot cake. The sheer yumminess of carrot cake has overwhelmed the boundaries of my boxes.

We had some golden sunshine this weekend. Damjan and I spent much of it indoors. Damjan is close to finishing his master work. I was preparing for a big presentation for a competition.

In the late afternoon, we rewarded ourselves with break, walking through the lushly green University Parks. We had just finished lunch and were now headed to a particular corner of the park. A few weeks earlier, we had staked out a mulberry tree. We saw the whitish-red fruit on it and that, give a few weeks, the fruit would ripen and darken.

Today, some of the fruit were ready. We were competing with wasps. Any berry with a wasp on it, we conceded. That left about twenty dark ripe berries for us.

By the time we were finished, the tree had served us satisfying sweet dessert. Our hands were covered in mulberry blood, bright and sticky. We didn’t mind, and squished the berry juice between our hands as we walked back to work.

Yesterday, our electric shower unit did something strange and inconvenient. Instead of water coming out of the showerhead, suddenly almost all the water was pouring out of a hole in the lower left corner of the wall unit.

After a thoroughly unsatisfactory shower, I padded back into the bathroom to investigate. The hole seems to have been designed. I poked my finger up into it and tried to find a flap or something that I could close. Nothing.

I then decided to seal the hole with electrical duct, thus forcing the water to go up to the shower head. I couldn’t find any tape in the house.

Then I tried shoving a ball of blu tack into the hole. This was unsuccessful. The blu tack seal was not watertight and the water continued to spurt out around the blue blob.

In my search for duct tape, I had come across tubes of sealant under the kitchen sink. I wondered if I was brave enough to use them to make a watertight seal.

By this time, I was getting late for work. However, I was on the scent of a trail now and I wanted to get to the end.

I hopped on the internet and found the website of Triton, the manufacturer of the shower unit. Here, I started to get answers.

Frequently asked question: When I turn on my electric shower water starts leaking out from the bottom of the unit, why?

If water is leaking from a clear plastic tube or small plastic elbow in the unit, then the Pressure Relief Device (PRD) has been activated. The most common reasons for the PRD to activate are that the showerhead has become blocked or there is a restriction in the shower hose.

That’s it! London’s water is stupidly hard. My cups of tea always carry a film of calcium. The showerhead must be blocked with lime scale.

I longed to solve the problem now but I had a teleconference with South Africa at 9am…

So I rushed to work, had my teleconference, another meeting, a teleconference with Dubai, found out that three team members (good friends) had just been made redundant, then another meeting.

After a depressed lunch commiserating with laid off colleagues, I went on the internet and paid for a new PRD to be posted to me First Class.

I worked late, got home to cook and eat dinner, then went on the internet again (what did we do before the WWW?) to find out how one goes about cleaning a showerhead.

I originally imagined that I had to do something like unscrew the showerplate and scrub it with a toothbrush. Then a colleague suggested soaking the showerhead in a lemon juice solution. My parents said vinegar would work too. I don’t have lemons at home. I do have vinegar, so I went downstairs to get a bucket and my bottle of vinegar.

Under the kitchen sink, right next to the bucket, were two packets of lime descaler! How fabulous.

I mixed the lime descaler with water and sunk the showerhead in the solution for half an hour. Then I wiggled the showerhead in a bowl of clean water, scrubbed it with a toothbrush for good measure, and was gratified to see lots of little brown bits sinking to the bottom of the bowl.

I had resigned myself to having baths for the next day or two while waiting for the new PRD to arrive so that I could replaced the tripped one. PRDs are ‘use once’ and need to be installed back into place.

Imagine my excitement, then, when my freshly cleaned showerhead started squirting out a respectable stream of water!

There is still some water (around a third of the total flow) coming out of the hole at the bottom. I think the only way to stop that is to replace the PRD. But while I wait for the spare one and while I take a couple of days to figure out how to install it, I will at least be able to have hot showers.

Hooray for DIY Joan!