Victorianitas

Ikea sells stuff which is reasonably cheap when you buy one of it. Not so much when you get a carful. Especially since you have to walk through the whole shop before getting to the checkout (well, you don't have to, but: it's Ikea! it's funky minimalist laminate chic! You have to), so you go in for pillowcases and a draining rack and come out with five hundred plastic things called Skorkopp, which is not so cheap at all.

Still. It's Ikea. It's worth it.

I've also helped to cut down a tree today, to a given value of 'helped' (carrying a saw and then leaning on a dead branch). This took about a minute and a half, to what I'm hoping is the pleased surprise of my boyfriend's grandpa, who gave us a pretty dubious look when we were heading to the tree with the saw. My boyfriend's grandpa - 97, with strong opinions on brandy in coffee and the superiority of the Muppets over this Wallace-and-Gromit nonsense - is brilliant, and not least because he does a fantastic line in well-timed theatrical eye-rolling, something which fortunately appears to be genetic judging by my boyfriend's baby photos. It's kind of wonderful to see a smirk-and-perfectly-raised-eyebrow combination perfected as early as 18 months.

Also, it's strange how simultaneously fascinating and weird it is to see photos of people you love from before you knew them. I've seen old film of my boyfriend as a toddler, trying to drive a bus, which was sweet until the toddler I didn't know looked at me with the same half-sheepish, half-amused expression that I know belongs to someone I've only ever known as an adult. Carol Ann Duffy said it best, to an old photograph of her mother as a teenager; these are other people, almost, not quite.