Author Topic: The Grumble Thread - No energy for a full on rant. (Read 1625877 times)

Mrs Pingu · « **Reply #2625 on:** 11 December, 2012, 08:56:11 pm »

Quote from: barakta on 11 December, 2012, 08:31:55 pm

If you care about the providence of your tea water then empty & refill the kettle yourself IMHO!

Well, quite

clarion · « **Reply #2626 on:** 11 December, 2012, 09:03:48 pm »

We have a device (bought by the retiring Partner) at work which boils a cupful of water each time. Very clever.

barakta · « **Reply #2627 on:** 11 December, 2012, 09:14:36 pm »

We go through about 2 kettles a year although the latest one at least pours properly, the last one didn't. This one is easier to put 1cup of water worth into although if you do that someone else'll come along and want it so I usually do "me plus a bit" cos during the day the kitchen's fairly heavily used by the ~40 building inhabitants. I swear we run on CAFFEINE!

RJ · « **Reply #2628 on:** 11 December, 2012, 09:19:37 pm »

Quote from: barakta on 11 December, 2012, 08:31:55 pm

Although I do hate the people who will open a BRAND new 4pt bottle of milk cos they decide the half empty one must be poisonous. Milk doesn't last in our fridge long enough to go nasty FFS.

It's the ones who leave a dribble of milk in the carton to avoid rinsing and ~~binning~~ recycle-binning I can't stand. Oh, and flatten them too please? Or shall we make you take them to the nearest paakging waste bins by bike, hmmm?

And breathe ...

hellymedic · « **Reply #2629 on:** 11 December, 2012, 09:49:37 pm »

My partner prefers reboiled water in his tea.
London water is hard and most of the hardness is lost (or deposited inside the kettle) on first boling.
Reboiled water makes tea that's less scummy...

barakta · « **Reply #2630 on:** 11 December, 2012, 10:47:14 pm »

Canterbury used to have chunks of limestone in your hot drink - twas very annoying. Good old Canterbury carbonate... I don't miss that at all.

Kim · « **Reply #2631 on:** 11 December, 2012, 10:49:13 pm »

Quote from: barakta on 11 December, 2012, 10:47:14 pm

Canterbury used to have chunks of limestone in your hot drink - twas very annoying. Good old Canterbury carbonate... I don't miss that at all.

Same stuff in helly's part of the world. I grew up on it, and ^{_{don't drink tea...}}

barakta · « **Reply #2632 on:** 11 December, 2012, 10:54:57 pm »

Quote from: Kim on 11 December, 2012, 10:49:13 pm

Quote from: barakta on 11 December, 2012, 10:47:14 pm
Canterbury used to have chunks of limestone in your hot drink - twas very annoying. Good old Canterbury carbonate... I don't miss that at all.

Same stuff in helly's part of the world. I grew up on it, and ^{_{don't drink tea...}}

I don't remember the London stuff being Quite So Bloody Crunchy as the Canterbury stuff.

S'ok, I don't make YOU drink tea!

Butterfly · « **Reply #2633 on:** 11 December, 2012, 11:00:55 pm »

We're on Surrey water now, so it's quite posh and nice, but even the metallic stuff when I lived in Stockwell was nothing compared to the appalling water in Faversham, which was bad enough that my parent's kettle looked 5 years old within 2 weeks. It was awful. East Kent Water must have HUGE pumps to cope with the weight!

Kim · « **Reply #2634 on:** 11 December, 2012, 11:01:58 pm »

Quote from: barakta on 11 December, 2012, 10:54:57 pm

I don't remember the London stuff being Quite So Bloody Crunchy as the Canterbury stuff.

Different values of London. The stuff we had in our Stratford flat would have mostly come from the Lea, whereas over in the fictional county of Middlesex and out into the murky realms of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire it's mainly from boreholes.

None of it tastes quite as dreadful as Manchester water, and the People's Republic still has the best all-rounder.

MattH · « **Reply #2635 on:** 12 December, 2012, 09:00:56 am »

I live close to Basingstoke. When we ask people how many lumps they want in their hot drinks, we're talking about the water, not sugar

clarion · « **Reply #2636 on:** 12 December, 2012, 09:29:00 am »

Worst water I ever tasted (and I avoided it as far as was possible!) was in Orpington. Yuk.

At work, when we use the kettle, we use a tea strainer to catch the chunks.

anotherdeadhero · « **Reply #2637 on:** 12 December, 2012, 09:31:40 am »

The water in the People's anarcho-syndicalist commune of Brizzol is OK. Not much of a patch on water at home in Salopia mind, where it had just run off them there hills (and the sheep on the hills). Worst I had was Pembroke - so soft you couldn't get any flavour into the tea, and soap would not lather - I was going to try and find some salt soap!

Wowbagger · « **Reply #2638 on:** 12 December, 2012, 09:42:57 am »

Surely soap lathers better in soft water?

In Essex we have hard water, but throughout much of the county kettles don't properly fur up but have what is known as "egg-shell hardness". It's down to the wide shallow reservoirs we have, and the presence of enormous quantities of blue-green algae, all photosynthesising like buggery, and the chemical effect they have on the calcium salts. 'Twas my brother who told me this. He was a water company chemist for 42 years so it must be true.

We have a water softener which was installed at the same time as our solar panel: solar panels fur up very quickly. We have one tap, the cold tap in the kitchen, which gives unsoftened water. I tend to wash my hands under the kitchen hot tap and rinse them under the cold tap. Softened water doesn't react with the soap so leaves a slimy film on your hands which takes ages to get rid of. The hardness in the cold tap gets rid of it straight away.

The softest water I know of is that in East Manchester. Mrs Wow's mother has a dark stain on her bath, which is a result of the water having come form a reservoir which collects from peat hills, or so I've been told..

clarion · « **Reply #2639 on:** 12 December, 2012, 09:52:27 am »

Best water I ever had was in Mankinholes. From a spring just below Stoodley Pike, running off millstone grit.

Lovely.

anotherdeadhero · « **Reply #2640 on:** 12 December, 2012, 10:06:45 am »

Quote from: Wowbagger on 12 December, 2012, 09:42:57 am

Surely soap lathers better in soft water?

It appears I am in error. My apologies ... some variable, unaccounted for.

Wowbagger · « **Reply #2641 on:** 12 December, 2012, 10:21:36 am »

Mrs. Wow's sister lives in a large converted cow byre south of Burnley and they have their own water supply coming form a hole dug in the hill above them. They recently spent a lot of money on their own treatment plant as the water was full of all sorts of stuff. Their plant extracts manganese from it, apparently, and I feel pretty sure that the water has a high copper content: before they had the treatment plant installed, the water would turn a beautiful shade of blue when you washed your hands in it.

Wowbagger · « **Reply #2642 on:** 12 December, 2012, 10:25:03 am »

My grumble is that there's too much random illness in this house. Mrs. Wow has been suffering for weeks: she's got the dreaded labyrinthitis, which is taking ages to leave her alone, which has made her usual December Blues a lot worse. The dog is really ill as well, I think as a result of the long-standing wound on his leg. He's on strong antibiotics and is a very pitiful creature at the moment. And now we've got freezing fog outside, which makes everything feel lots colder.

I'll be bloody glad when I've had enough of this.

dasmoth · « **Reply #2643 on:** 12 December, 2012, 11:35:12 am »

Why don't Amazon sell new respiratory tracts. I'm sure mine is past overdue for an upgrade!

Annoyingly the count/bad-indigestion correlation doesn't seem to have been a one-off, either.

Cudzoziemiec · « **Reply #2644 on:** 12 December, 2012, 11:54:15 am »

The worst tasting tap water I've ever drunk was in Warsaw. I don't recall it being particularly hard, it just had a foul taste. Fortunately various parts of the city, including the area I lived in, had "oligocene wells" where you could fill bottles with water piped from deep underneath whatever rocks are there.

fuzzy · « **Reply #2645 on:** 12 December, 2012, 12:14:56 pm »

Some of the best water i have tasted has been that available at the public drinking fountains on hot and sweaty days in Rome and Pompeii.

Jacomus · « **Reply #2646 on:** 12 December, 2012, 01:31:55 pm »

Quote from: fuzzy on 12 December, 2012, 12:14:56 pm

Some of the best water i have tasted has been that available at the public drinking fountains on hot and sweaty days in Rome and Pompeii.

Dehydration works wonders on the taste of water!

anotherdeadhero · « **Reply #2647 on:** 12 December, 2012, 01:55:51 pm »

Oh that reminds me of the water in my Halls of Residence, aeons ago. Milky-white, with a pronounced effervescence, nasal notes of hot metal.

I took the lesson of history, and drank only beer ...

hulver · « **Reply #2648 on:** 12 December, 2012, 02:06:06 pm »

Oi! Purveyor of sandwiches containing bacon. I asked for Brown sauce. The one true pairing of sauce and cured, salty pig.

Imagine my disappointment when biting into the sandwich, and having the sweet taste of cheep tomato sauce flooding over my tongue.

I will mention this next time we meet.

MattH · « **Reply #2649 on:** 12 December, 2012, 05:07:09 pm »

I think that you posted in the wrong thread. Contaminating bacon with "red sauce" should be a hanging offence.