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
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.
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.
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.
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!
