What is it? It looks to me as a cross between typewriter and a keyboard.
Is it for musical messages?

What a coincindence! There's a (rather negative) article on B. S. Johnson in this week's issue of De Groene Amsterdammer ("The Green Amsterdammer"(probably something he ate)) written by Jacques Vogelaar (once described as "the champion of the unreadable book").

Bike racks, from Halfords.

 

Yes, it is bad luck. I know how it feels.
I am waiting for a good day to do big washing of things that has to be done once a year, but this summer doesn't look promising.
I don't know how people with no washing machines and dryers survived. Also they used to have so many children. My neighbor has 17 siblings. How did they do their washing with the weather as unpredictable as it is here?
Can you imagine to have seventeen children? I asked if all of them had the same mother and they did.

Richard, I must INSIST that you apply yourself to your Tax Return IMMEDIATELY and STOP FAFFING AROUND, otherwise cornichon privileges will be suspended indefinitely.

Here endeth the Intervention

Was that ok?

For t-p and Milly, the opening of Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower:



                                                         Washday

Jacob Dietmahler was not such a fool that he could not see that they had arrived at his friend's house on the washday. They should not have arrived anywhere, certainly not at this great house, the largest but two in Weissenfels, at such a time. Dietmahler's own mother supervised the washing three times a year, therefore the household had linen and white underwear for four months only. He himself possessed eighty-nine shirts, no more. But here, at the Hardenberg house in Kloster Glasse, he could tell from the great dingy snowfall of sheets, pillow-cases, bolster-cases, vests, bodices, drawers, from the upper windows into the courtyard, where grave looking servants, both men and women, were receiving them into great baskets, that they washed only once a year. This might not mean wealth, in fact he knew that in this case it didn't, but it was certainly an indication of long standing. A numerous family also. The underwear of children and young persons, as well as the larger sizes, fluttered through the blue air, as though the children themselves had taken to flight.

"Fritz, I'm afraid you have brought me here at an inconvenient moment. You should have let me know. Here I am, a stranger to your honoured family, knee deep in your smallclothes."

I thought Monday was Wash day. I'd never heard of people in the past leaving all their washing to do once, twice or thrice a year! Though I have heard of children being sewn into their winter clothes... We should have a Domestic History thread!