Happy Birthday

Unfortunately not having a phone and working shitty hours makes it very difficult to communicate at times.  Moreover my email is up the spout, unfortunately because today is a special little someone’s birthday.  And this old fart didn’t get it together to send a card in good time.

I found this little snap taken exactly 40 years ago in Blackpool when the birthday boy was a little slimmer and taller and darker.

Honestly when parents do this sort of thing to their children, you wonder that their children even try to keep in touch.

Hope it’s nice where you are ‘cuz it was minus three this morning.

x

Autumn leaves

As part of the general cost cutting drive here at chez Corr I’ve stopped using the car and started using the bike again. I park it up the side of the house in a narrow alley between mine and the auld fella next door. It doesn’t get much light and the floor was getting a bit mossy and slippy which was made much worse by the leaves piling up in drifts which trap the moisture and rot down and turn it into a death trap. So I swept up the leaves, cleared the drains, sprayed bleach to kill the moss etc and did the same with the front garden: – one of those little handkerchiefs in front of the house – swept up all the leaves and put down some weed killer.

Well strike a light but about half an hour later my adjoining neighbour was out raking hers up and – I kid you not – hoovering them! Would it be uncharitable of me to think that she was waiting for me to do my garden before cleaning hers in case any of my leaves blew back into her garden?

The joys of home ownership.  However I have now cleared a ton of junk from the side of the house and taken it to the tip which has made me feel a little virtuous and prompted me to get more done.

I was watching a slightly odd German comedian called Henning Wehn ( Markus are you still reading ) who made a funny point about the British and their home ownership and spending habits: The British don’t spend within their income…the spend to keep their interest repayments within their income!

It seems a bit daft to be going back to bike riding when its so cold and unpleasant but I’ve been monitoring my spending and the car has been costing an average of nearly £100 per month in petrol where the bike would be a quarter of that. Except that its been a bit of a bugger to start in the cold weather and I reluctantly had to concede that it needed a new battery. Actually I’ve known this for a year but it has now become critical as the weather gets freezing. So 40 points Halfords, nil points moi.

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Its our Christmas do this Saturday and I am so looking forward to that;  sixty hairy truckers in the Swan in Elstow.  In the manner of buses,  I also have an invite to another xmas do in London on the Sunday which I’d rather go to but Sunday is not so good with me driving on a Monday.

About the house

 
I’m still trying to decide what to do about the house, or rather how much I can afford or am prepared to do.  I’m still drafting plans of the place which is useful as by doing so I discover things about the place that I hadn’t noticed before such as a skewed wall or a drain cover that was hidden below a carpet.  The latter put an end to any ideas of moving the bathroom.  However I think I now know roughly how much work I want to undertake and am working on how to structure it and how long to take.  Nothing serious will get done until next year

In the meantime though, I realise most major work will be downstairs so I will go ahead with a basic redecoration of the three bedrooms and hall upstairs.

So I am clearing out the spare rooms and reducing things to a minimum upstairs.  I will then strip the wallpapers (woodchip all the way through – yuk) and take away the skirtings.  Prep the walls (lots of nails to be removed and holes to fill) then decide whether to repaint or repaper.  Then prep the woodwork in the upstairs landing and the doorframes.  I will replace all the existing doors and I am about to buy a paint spray gun to get a high quality finish.  Lastly I will put down a laminate wooden floor all the way through with new skirting.  I quite look forward to this because I’ve got some experience now and its not too difficult if youve got the tools and take your time.

The staircase is the only part of the house that will get carpeting but that will be done last and I will get a wee man in for that as its very difficult.

Downstairs, I think I will enlarge the kitchen and bathroom as already  mentioned subject to quotes for the extension.  I am considering building a fake chimney breast in order to reinstall a period fireplace.  This is to be purely decorative and in order to give some focus to the room and break up a blank seven metre wall.  But here’s the curious thing:  I drafted a scale drawing last weekend of the wall with the new chimney piece and it looks completely wrong. 

 

 The proportions of the room look different on paper from how they appear in real life!  I’ve measured and re-measured and I know the drawing is correct but it still looks weird. It seems longer and lower in real life. 

The two hatched rectangles at the bottom are the remaining concrete plinths of the original fireplaces and the cutaway at the top is the RSJ lintel where the original dividing wall used to be (at least I HOPE there is an RSJ in there). So the planned breast is only what was originally there. In fact there would have been two. How cramped the original rooms must have been!

So the dilemma is how do I plan something on paper knowing that it will look different in real life?  I suspect that an Edwardian fireplace would have looked OK ninety years ago when the cluttered look was the norm but is out of place to our modern sensibilities. I think it might be better to concentrate on a cleaner modern look and concentrate on higher quality of fittings, smart radiators and doors and good flooring and lighting; Not to worry about fake decorations.

In fact I think I’ve just made my mind up on that.

Recession over – Official!

After weeks of being in the retailing doldrums, home deliveries have kicked off.  The nation is back on its food and ordering Argos beds and all is well in the world.  The government’s quick and decisive action has saved the day.  Actually is anyone really going to respond to a 2.5% cut in VAT?  Its not a lot of money really and will retailers pass it on anyway?  Mind you its led to some inevitable whinging about how difficult it is for businesses to cut the rate…funny they never have any trouble saying “10% off all items all this week” at any other time of the year yet suddenly it is hard work to say “2.5% off all products till further notice.”

My humble suspicion is that far from averting a crisis the Gordy’s Govt have in no small part contributed by dickering about for months, cheque book in hand, whilst various industries circle about going “hold it lads,  let’s see the size of the payout before we do anything.”  The latest is the US car industry, sitting cross-legged next to the cash machine with mournful eyes and cap in hand begging for alms. 

Should governments of market economies even be intervening in their markets like socialist governments of old?   And where they do, through necessity, should they not apply some penalties? “Ok we’ll bail out this bank with public funds but we want some heads in return.”  Senior financial executives should face prosecution for bringing public funds into risk.   The insurance industry understands the concept of moral hazard.  If you just pay out to a motorist for example, in full, everytime he loses his car, then he will never do anything to take care of his asset.  That’s the point of having to pay an Excess.  The government has created a bad precedent that will come back and bite it.

Gordy is so funny; he has picked up some of the spin and presentation habits of his predecessor:  lots of “power adjectives and adverbs”.  But he does it in such a clumsy way.  So he keeps hammering home the idea of quick and decisive action, or decisive and necessary etc.  Imagine him in the conjugal bed at number 10, heaving away manfully atop the lovely Lady Brown, breath coming in shorter and shorter bursts until he is heard to cry “ooh ooh I’m going to take swift and decisive action”.

Anyway, whatever, we seem to be busy – think of the overtime James – and looking at last year’s hours we stayed quite busy until the second week of December.

I was going to say less about the economy and more about what I have done round the house this week but I need to rush off now but not before saying a special birthday wish to a special little soldier:  Yes the chubby little fellow in the red dungarees is 39 years young today.  Next one’s the big one little man!  Unfortunately I didn’t have time to edit out the horror story in the Jonathon Ross suit.  Check out the tie.  The year was 1970.   The picture was taken in Partick, I remember it well.  The expression on Neccles’s face didn’t last long…after the flash, the howling started.  And has remained more or less continuously since.

Happy Birthday little bro!

Recession beating tips (part 1)

The trouble with all this recession hysteria is that there are always more than one way to look at a situation and the meeja (in the UK anyway) can only look at it one way.  Instead of beating breasts and howling about how bad things we need to concentrate on the positives.

I still say that we are in a market economy and what markets do is stabilise.  Prices go up and down.  The housing markets in UK and US were overheated and our respective economies were over-reliant on property inflation (which is a form of pyramid selling).  It was clearly a bubble and bubbles burst.  Against everyone’s advice (“no no no”, I was told, “never come off the ladder, even if you are unemployed.  Its the worst thing you can do”) I sold my house in March 2007 because I thought it was saturated and I was right. I’m no genius; if I can see it coming why can’t the experts.  So house prices are stabilising.  Big deal.  That’s not necessarily bad.  It means they start to become affordable again for people who were being priced out.  I tried to listen to a programme on Radio 4 about house prices last night but it was hopelessly skewed to the point of view of investment buyers (who bought to let and have seen the prices of their investment drop).  This is a market.  Markets have buyers and sellers.  What is bad for one is usually good for the other.  The meeja is full of doom and gloom.  This week the Dreadful Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 hosted a show about how people could make ends meet during this coming Winter, but there isn’t any reason to assume people will have a dreadful Christmas.  People actually have more money in their pockets.  Interest rates have dropped.  My mortgage has dropped over a hundred a month since I took it on three months ago.  Obviously if jobs go then it becomes different and here is the rub:  If you actually believe there is a problem, even where none exists, then it will become a problem.

Problems were exacerbated by a temporary hike in the oil price.   Crude hit a record high mid year but has dropped by nearly half since then.  It was hysteria when it went up (little old ladies were predicted to die of hypothermia in their millions) but the drop has gone unremarked.  It was a blip.  Though it is a blip that will come back.  Increasingly.  This is the sound that the oil makes as it starts to run out.  We’ve had a frantic cheap oil and gas fuelled consumer boom in the last 40 years but it is largely over.  We can’t expect to live the same lifestyles we have been doing;  we can’t heat our houses to thirty degrees in Winter and run around in our underwear.  I’m old enough to remember life before central heating and cheap North Sea gas and can therefore deal with life after it as well.

Charity shop bargain at £2.45

Instead of whining about fuel bills I am going to manage the situation so despite the winter weather my heating is mainly OFF.  I only have it on in the living room if at all, not on a timer, only when I’m in and only at a low level; its cardies and slippers time.  Bedroom’s cold but I prefer that; and I stick a hot water bottle in the bed which takes the chill off the sheet.  Bathroom’s cold which is a bother but its madness to heat a whole room just for the few seconds between undressing and getting into the shower and which is the sort of self-indulgence that everyone is going to have to forgo.  I’m checking the meter every week and I know exactly how much my bill is so far and British Gas is not going to make record profits out of me!  Oil prices are just going to get higher; they cannot possibly go any other way and we should treat this as an opportunity to start managing the situation.

I picked up a great gadget yesterday in a Jarrity shop for all of £2.45.  Its a sixties/seventies pump action vacuum flask.  This is an old money saving trick:  Fill it with boiling water in the morning (it takes 2.5 litres) and you have hot water on tap for coffee or washing a couple of dishes during the day.  The point is that it takes a lot of water and gas to get the hot tap running hot which is expensive just to wash a few cups or plates.  This gadget seems to work really well and the water stays hot all day.  Moreover if you want a quick cuppa then you don’t have to wait for the kettle to boil – just push the button on top and out comes lovely hot water.

The only thing is I think this item is from the sixties or seventies and is not only un-used but still in its original box and I suspect it might be of more value to a retro collector.  I’m gonna try this for a week or so and if it works I might buy a modern one and see if I can flog this.  If it is collectible, then it would be a shame to put it to hard labour.

Kitchen heaven kitchen hell

I’ve declared war on the BBC. Its latest puerile act is to offer to refund those people who phone-voted for John Sergeant who has just resigned from some Dancing show. Not only a pointless act but an extremely dangerous precedent. Oi! How about refunding me some of my licence fee everytime you cancel a scheduled programme because the snooker over ran? What a palaver…some bloke resigns from a silly dance programme and its the biggest news since 9/11! The world’s gone mad.

I’m not watching much these days. Most programmes seem to be fly on the wall type things, reality shows (reality on what planet pray?), and various takes on the bizarrely competitive, dripping with spurious amounts of artificial drama. For example something I catch just before going to work is called Rosemary Schrager’s cookery school. Or something like that. The inaptly named Rosemary is a huffy puffy fat dinner lady who used to run a cookery school. But now its been rebranded, as has she, as a cross between Clare Rayner and Gordon Ramsay. She’s obviously been told to be more rude and aggressive whilst the contestants have been briefed to be very scared and say “yes chef”, “no chef” a lot.

Its all about getting through to the next round as these shows usually are and when she announces who is going through, we have to suffer these long, dramatic………..pauses whilst we get this dudoof dudoof heartbeat style sound effect. In one case I timed the pause at ten seconds. Call me old fashioned but I don’t think that watching a fat woman breathing heavily for ten seconds makes riveting television. But what is nauseating is when she judges the food. “Right” she’ll huffle, “I’m now going to taste this for seasoning” then dive in like a hog at the trough, making these awful snuffling snorting noises. Truly awful stuff.

Its pissing me off that I have to pay fifteen quid a month to the BBC just to own a tv which I mainly use to watch dvds and freeview channels and I am investigating ways around this.  Looks like I might get away with detuning the thing so I only use it for watching dvds and stop paying the licence.  Or sell the thing entirely and get a bigger flat screen and watch dvds on the PC.  But I am not prepared to subsidise the BBC in its flight to mediocrity and banality.

Meanwhile I am loving my kitchen. It is twice the size of the kitchen of my last house and probably three times that of the flat. It needs a refurb, which I will deal with lastly, and the oven is unusable because the previous owners had never heard of Mr Muscle, but I’ve got so much space. I’ve bought a microwave combi oven which will roast a chicken or heat a takeaway and the hob works but the great thing is the amount of space. For years I’ve wanted a retro style set of kitchen scales like in a sweet shop. Finally I saw something I liked in a local junk shop. I’m quite pleased with it though the weights are grubby and imperial. After much hunting I managed to get hold of a set of metric cast iron weights this morning. I dismantled the scales to clean them and inside was datestamped the year of manufacture: 1951. My goodness they engineered things well in those days. Made in England of course, back when we had a manufacturing industry, and not only solid stove enamelled iron and forged steel but an astonishing number of moving parts. Guess that’s why we don’t have a manfact industry anymore; the Germans or Japanese would make them lighter and with fewer parts. But they are amazingly accurate. Once I had oiled everything they balance perfectly. Despite how heavy they are, the slightest weight on either side will tip them. I’m trying to find the lightest object that will register: even a single cranberry will tilt them (don’t ask). I think they will pay for themselves when I set up a drugs factory in my kitchen to beat the recession. But I am pleased to own something that is so solidly and so well-made; a little piece from a time when build quality was a matter of course.

OMG I’ve just turned into an old fart.

Brainless Backboneless Cretins

How many BBC executives does it take to change a lightbulb?  Ans= Four:  One to change the bulb, two to apologise cravenly for putting everyone temporarily into darkness and one to resign pointlessly…no, make that five, another one has just resigned…

The BBC has really set itself a silly precedent.  When did it start? With that Queen nonsense and then with the phone-in palaver.  Indeed it probably started with new labour’s attempts to redress the various scandals of the Major government and set a new level of public probity.  Unfortunately there have been some unforseen consequences resulting in a hysterical and completely disproportionate mass-suicide everytime there is some sort of scandal.

I don’t even know what Wossy and Brand did exactly – apparently it happened weeks ago.  It sounds extremely childish and tasteless but that’s what they do.  Its been said already, but you can’t have ‘edgy’ entertainers then expect them to stay always within mother Grundy’s guidelines.

But what annoys me enough to register it is the fact that Jonathon Ross has been suspended:  I don’t care much about Brand but JR is easily my favourite entertainer and his Saturday radio show is one of the few that I go out of my way to catch.  So by punishing him, the fan-base suffers.  Its just so much like being at school again so a great big rousing Fuck You to the BBC.

I’ve been off work with a bit of a chest infection which is a bit of a bore but in the last two days I’ve finally gotten around to finishing what I started over a month ago.  Ive been drafting the layout of my house using Autocad and checking the feasibility of various ideas I’ve had.  My house is an extended Edwardian semi with a very common layout of three bedrooms upstairs and a longer downstairs with the bathroom tacked on at the back, behind the kitchen.  As seen below:

Existing floor plan

Proposed floor plan

This leads to a common Catch 22 situation: You either have 3 beds and a downstairs bath or you have an upstairs bathroom but only 2 beds. I thought I had found a way around this: I was going to turn bedroom three into a new bathroom then turn the existing downstairs extension including the lobby and some of the kitchen into a guest suite cum study cum en-suite bedroom. The area lost from the kitchen would be recouped by adding a conservatory to the side making a breakfast/utility area. This would be accessed by taking the large existing kitchen window down to ground level which wouldn’t require any structural enhancement. It would also provide a route to the outside removing the need for the existing lobby and door.

There would be issues to deal with such as awkward shapes but the real killer is discovering via my neighbour who has lived next door for sixty eight years that, hidden under a carpet in my lobby, outside the toilet, is the manhole cover for the drain of my house and the the house on the other side. I can’t hide a drain cover under a bedroom floor and it would cost money to move it outside. Right now, with potential resale value dropping, I’m not going to spend even more money with a likely reduced return.

However there is a plan B.  Building regs no longer require a space between kitchen and bathroom so I simply remove the lobby and the division between toilet and bath to make a larger, more luxurious bathroom whilst still enlarging the kitchen with a conservatory which will also provide the access to the back garden. Cheaper and simpler. Not what I really wanted but on the other hand, it is still a standard layout for this type of property.

I don’t want to keep going on about the weather but since I got back from a sunny and beautiful Florence in mid October it has been vile. It’s only Autumn but it feels like January. We have had heavy frosts and last week we had severe snow. In twenty odd years I’ve been here I’ve never seen snow before January. Not only did it snow but the snow sat for over a day in some places. Anyway that’s what I’ve had to contend with.

Now I’ve bought my house I thought I should move on and find a new job. I haven’t looked very hard yet but it doesn’t seem a brilliant idea at the moment. I thought of just caning it through to Christmas getting as much overtime as possible and putting a bit in the bank then looking for a new job but with a bit of a break in between to get cracking on the project. Trouble with that theory is that work is a bit erratic at the moment. One week its hectic and I trouser a lot, then the next (eg last week), it is a struggle to get in the minimum contractual number of hours.

Anyway I’ve been incredibly lazy around the house since I moved in a month ago. I will get cracking this week if it stays dry. I still need to get rid of a lot of junk down to the tip, then I can move some stuff into the shed and clear a bit of space. And I have been having fun drafting the place using autocad (much more difficult than it sounds). I need to finish that off and then do a feasability and costing on moving the bathroom.

Currently the bath and toilet are in a damp mouldy extension at the back of the kitchen and I desparately want to move it upstairs. At my age I seem to need to go for a senior moment at least once during the night and at the moment it is horrible staggering downstairs in slippers and dressing gown and through to the back of the house. Cold, dark and horrible. I have quite a cunning plan to move it upstairs and turn the existing bathroom into a guest suite/office whilst enlarging the kitchen but I need to draft my plan to see if it is workable and then see how much of a builder-job it will be.

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We are all familiar with the idea that the country is being taken over by Poles (apparently they are all buggering off back because of the recession and the weather – quite right too; they work too hard and show us all up). What we have noticed is the increase in Polish sections of the supermarket selling lots of funny sausages and beetroot (we HAVE these things already). But here is an oddity I spotted in a local supermarket. This is only a small Budgens in the small village of Bromham, not a London supermarket which is what it makes it all the more strange: A South African shelf. I was tempted but what put me off comes from the fact that I have to read the ingredients of everything I buy to make sure there is no cow juice. All of these products are pretty rich in not just milk but a whole lot of other things as well.  I was sore tempted to a packet of chocolate ProNutro, up upon which I grew.  But the list of ingredients took up most of the pack, it is loaded with powdered milk and it was more than five pound (about sixty rand).  I’ll leave it the way it tastes in my memory.

Florence

After 20 years I finally got around to visiting Florence.  I’ve never heard a good word about the place which is reputed to be hot, noisy and crowded.  I thought that in October it would be relatively cool and calm but it was still pretty packed.  I have mixed views.  It definitely suffers from the crowds but they disappear after about six in the evening.  Trouble is you have to pay for everything, even the major churches so it can get pricey.  I felt a bit been-there-dunnit about the place.  It is a beautiful mediaeval city but Bologna is more so and without the crowds and the litter.  Actually the litter is not so much the problem as the ugly street furniture and skips that are everywhere.  By about the second evening I started to warm to the place a bit when I was walking over the ponte Vecchio and realised that the crowds were gone and it was very lovely.  As you can see from my panorama, there are some beautiful views but you have to work hard to exclude the ugly bits.  I didn’t do many museums; I don’t really like traipsing around galleries but I liked it well enough.  I wouldn’t rush back though.  I much prefer Bologna for its mediaeval feel, or Naples for its energy or Rome for its architecture.  One thing that did surprise me was how friendly it was.  I know what it’s like to live in a tourist town (London, not Bedford)  and I delight in walking through tourists’ pictures but people here were consistently courteous and smiley.  What a change from Rome!

What surprised me most about Firenze was the number of bicycles.  I don’t think I’ve seen so many since Amsterdam.  But the traffic is pretty rammed and they have cycle lanes so it makes sense.  The food doesn’t seem to be that good either.  Perhaps they have gone downmarket for the tourist trade.  But in one window I saw a chip pizza; no really.  Here is the picture to prove it.   I was tempted to try it but, like the elusive deep fried mars bar, it remains, for me, an untried treat.

The flight was from Pisa airport which is very close to Pisa town so I just had to go and look at the leaning tower.  First impressions were ones of horror.  The crowds and the tourist junk etc.  But in fact the fame of the tower has detracted from the fact that the cathedral, esp the interior and the general cloistered complex are really beautiful. In fact it was the completion of Pisa cathedral that prompted the Florentines to outdo their neighbours by building the the now-famous Duomo. The rest of Pisa looks interesting and historic but I was too tired to explore much and the weather had turned grey. Away from the cathedral and tower it was pretty quiet and unusually, the people were plug ugly whereas the Florentines were well-dressed and beautiful.

More pictures as usual at www.imageevent.com/captainhaddock

Dude where’s my camera?

Humph..there has to be a better blogging engine than this one.  It takes too long to log in which is one reason for my lack of dilligence.

Anyway sod the financial crisis, this is all about me.

Haven’t got anywhere with the house yet apart from clearing some junk.  Got some shelves up today and got things a little organised.  Boxes off floors etc.  Tell you what trekking downstairs in a dressing gown on bare floorboards to an unheated bathroom at the back end of the house in Winter is a really nasty thought even right now.  A friend suggested a gazunder for those midnight callings…you know, gazunder the bed, but I think that is a despicable idea.

I seem to be permanently tired at the moment so not much is going to happen for a couple of weeks.  I finish early this week, Thursday and I am off to Florence for a couple of days.  I’ve just had a major panic looking for my camera charging adaptors.  Finally found them stuffed in a box (not where they should have been).  It would have been a case of going to the cradle of the renaissance with -gasp horror…a 35mm camera. 

I look forward to Florence but not getting there: this is going to be another early morning trek on the bike to Stansted (Bike parking is free) then laying a waterproof on the ground for changing before stripping off my gear, Bond-style, and emerging like a beautiful butterfly from a chrysalis in what I fondly imagine to be the most stylish travel gear suitable for Italy that I can find in my tired old wardrobe.  This is how I did Naples last year and it was freezing.  Weather report looking okay so far and the good news is that my flight is a civilized 8.30am so I at least I won’t be setting off at four in the morning.

I was supposed to be having 10 days in Spain but that fell through due to other parties’ finances…ah well, I’m not very good at sitting by a pool.  Anyway this will be the last of the major Italian cities that I have visited.  I could do without the spend but I booked it months ago and its only 4 nights and the hotel is cheap.  I will be doing a bit of social catch up when I get back next week.