Pork sausages

When we first moved to Epsom, more than thirty years ago now, there was a shed called Porky White's from whence came well known sausages and other pork products. You could buy the sausages, converted into superior sausage rolls - bread rolls that is, not the stuff sold by Greggs - sausage rolls as in ham rolls - on Derby Day at the Marquis of Granby - if you got there early enough that is. We even patronised the shed occasionally.

BH has been buying sausages from Sainsbury's called 'Porky Lites' for some time, and I had thought it likely that one of Sainsbury's suppliers had bought the use of the name. But quite wrong: we had some of these sausages today and it now appears the the old firm has moved onto bigger things. Organic growth really does exist. 

See references 1 and 2.

Housewives

Lunch was further enlivened by a discussion about housewives who do not live in houses, of which there must be a lot these days. With 'homewives' sounding terribly clumsy, if more accurate. Maybe married ladies living in flats prefer to go out to work? To get out of the house?

Checking with OED later, I find that house is a very old word, of old German rather than old French orgin, rating more than four pages - which I can assure readers is a lot, even by the standards of OED. And that excludes all the pages that follow of compounds and derivatives.

So we have a building for people to live in. 

A building housing some trade, for example a brewhouse or a lighthouse.

A building housing animals or goods, for example a henhouse or a warehouse.

A building housing monks. A usage later moved to universities and, later still, schools. 

A boarding house attached to a school. A boarding house for working men, such as existed when I first started work. Now largely vanished.

A building for housing members of Parliament and such like. Hence 'House of Commons'.

More obscure, probably obsolete, a household. But we did talk of the 'House of Windsor' or the 'House of York (that is, the one that got whopped in the Wars of the Roses).

A twelfth part of the heavens, as known to astrologers and fortune tells.

And it gets better the deeper one gets. No doubt, eventually, I would get to housewife, the original of 'hussy'. And a close relative of 'husband'.

Housing type

I then thought to ask Gemini how many people lived in flats, with the start of his answer being snapped above. With the house dwellers - remembering that the units here are buildings rather than people - being far more numerous than I expected.

In response to a further prompt, he goes on to explain why one might think that flat dwellers were more numerous than is actually the case and offers some comparison with nearby European countries.

Gemini's answer, seems to agree fairly well with that I got, only slightly more slowly from ONS. Taken from the 2021 Census.

All of which is reassuring, if not what I was expecting.

Bread

Time to take the bread out of the oven. In which connection I am pleased to be able to report that I now find the alarm clock on my telephone almost as easy to use as Gemini.

Proper proof reading may come later.

References

Reference 1: https://www.porkywhites.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.porkywhites.co.uk/about.

Reference 3: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/bulletins/housingenglandandwales/census2021.