Shake 'n Bake Apartments

We live in Pak City, a clump of nine high-rise apartment blocks that were built in about three days as a convenient method of laundering some of the grubby cash floating around these parts.  The flats are spacious, airy and well designed, and much nicer than most of the places I've lived.  Occasionally, though, you get a reminder of the fact that it took two Turkish families their lunch break for a couple of weeks to knock these buildings together.  Shutting the bin in the kitchen had the side effect of causing part of the doorframe to fall off.  The buttons for the lift on our floor were put on upside down, with the result that for three weeks I pressed down and couldn't understand why the lift would insist that I picked up an Armenian family on the tenth floor before heading downstairs.

Going up

I tend to take the stairs these days, partly for fitness reasons and partly because I harbour a secret fear that the lift will get stuck and the 'call operator' button will turn out to have been drawn on with a crayon.

Finally, and this is no fault of the builders, the blood from some long-forgotten meat has leaked and frozen in our freezer, so my peas rest on what you would get if Fergus Henderson started producing ice lollies.

The latest pudding at St John, London

I'm still here because Iraq has changed its mind on how it issues visas, so to go anywhere other than Kurdistan requires a phenomenal amount of effort on the part of one's admin department.  I'm told that the trick is to fly to Basra and from there to Baghdad, because for some reason Baghdad no longer recognises the Iraqi embassy in Jordan.  If you don't believe that there can possibly be such ruinous lack of communication within different parts of an organisation then you've obviously never tried to order a credit card over the phone with Santander.