Week 35: Deck Access

Charlotte’s birthday was nice, we ate and drank a lot and ended up doing some slightly drunk shopping on Oxford Street.

We saw Charlotte’s dad, we made him a giant Bounty for father’s day. The ratio of coconut to chocolate could have been better, but generally I think it was a success!

The flats above the flat I’d like to buy have deck access. I didn’t know that’s what it was called, but I learned the exciting way that lenders sometimes don’t like to give people mortgages for flats with deck access. We’re currently seeing if we can appeal this because it’s a central London flat. I don’t know what an appeal entails, but my mortgage broker thinks it’s worthwhile 🤷

The New York Times mini crossword has a leaderboard which you can add friends to and compare times. Annoyingly it only shows the times for the current day and there’s no way to get historical data for your group of people.

A few of us at work do the crossword daily, I decided to set up a small website that periodically scrapes the leaderboard and saves our times. Of course over the week I got far too into this idea and built a lot of extra stuff into the site.

We now have different awards to unlock and you can browse through averages and stuff. I’m pretty proud of it! If you’d like to join in then drop me an email or Slack me 🙂 (or check out the #crosswords channel if you work at the FT).

We went to Pub in the Park in Dulwich with Tammy and Alison as part of birthday celebrations. It was alright, but not sure if it was worth the money. I did get to see Monica Galetti and the food was really good. I’ve never been to Dulwich Village, it has big rich family vibes.

If you absolutely had to sleep with one or the other, would you go for Boris Johnson or Matt Hancock?

We took Tootsie to the park for the first time on his lead. He didn’t leave his carrier, bless him, I think it was all a bit much. We’ll try again some other time as he didn’t seem traumatised and I think it’s nice if he has occasional chances to be outside.