Steve

The Case of the Knackered Tumble-Dryer!

We couldn't work out why despite re-taping up all the joints, the tumble-dryer wasn't blowing or drying properly. Thankfully, on Friday while the legendary John H. was helping us to replace its broken drive-belt, he noticed that this piece of ducting (above) which is supposed to be beautifully rectangular, had completely failed. Although it was supposed to be heatproof, the exhaust from the tumble-dryer had shrunk it, until it was hardly letting any air through at all. Recycling wet-air repeatedly meant it wasn't drying much either! 

Ice Window

Extraordinary patterns in the ice on our attic Velux windows last week. (Click image to enlarge)

How to Keep Warm

The storm last May brought down a lot of trees near us, but the chaos of that Monday evening was offset by the nice collection of firewood for this winter that it produced. Several happy Spring days sawing, splitting, and stacking in order to get the wood nicely seasoned has made cold winter nights a lot more pleasant now. 

The sweet smell of woodsmoke, the peaty aroma of a fine dram.. the way to spend a January evening.

Ceiling...

I'm sure it didn't used to look like this.....

House Gig

On Saturday night, Perthshire singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Lins Honeyman held a 'Living Room Gig' round at our house, in conjunction with Morna Young (Vocals, Autoharp), Bruce Cameron (Guitars, Vocals) and Andy McCully (Guitars and Percussion).

Twenty five or so friends and neighbours piled into our house for food drink and music - and seemed to have a good night. It was certainly a squeeze in the living room, but the music was good and that atmosphere was warm both literally and metaphorically.

The musicians were in good form on Saturday - I have heard these guys play in various places before, and their repertoire has evolved over time. This was by far the least blues-orientated set I have heard them play, perhaps because of the evolving line-up of Honeyman's collaborators at these various events. Bruce Cameron's stunning folky finger-picking guitar, Andy McCully's more 'rocky' approach, and Morna Youngs soulful vocals have lured Lins a little further from the straightforward acoustic blues which used to dominate his performances. However, what we got was an eclectic mix of Blues, Soul, Ballads, and the surprise addition of some old Negro spirituals- one of which "I want Jesus to walk with me" was for me the highlight of the evening's entertainment.

We've never held a living-room gig before, but we really enjoyed it. There was a real buzz in the house, and it was great to meet some new folks as well as get to know some of neighbours better. We'd love to do one again sometime!

Weatherseal - Receiving the Hard-Sell

We had a strange experience this week with a double-glazing company called Weatherseal. I took a telephone call from one of their sales people, which suggested that the company were looking for a showhome in my postcode. They were looking for a property to take 'before' and 'after' photos of, to demonstrate how their products could revitalise a house. In exchange for using the house in their advertising, they would do the whole job completely free. This sounded too good to be true, so I checked with the telephone sales-person, asking one specific question: "Do you get told if your home has been selected for the promotion before you agree to the installation or not?" The answer I was given was that, someone would call round, assess the property for its advertising potential, and if it was the most suitable one in the area, authorise free installation, and that this would all be agreed without paying a penny.

It sounded too good to be true because of course it was.

On the evening the person was supposed to call, he appeared two hours later than agreed. He understood that he couldn't go into measure windows in the kids bedrooms while they were being put to bed and that the measuring couldn't proceed. His boss on the phone thought otherwise, and put us under pressure to 'wait until they were sleeping' and then go in and begin. It's the school holidays, and they weren't even going to bed until nine-ish! Clearly these salesmen are being driven, and are under inordinate pressure from HQ.

The following night the assessor re-appeared. Bright, friendly, articulate and only 15 minutes late, he came - not to assess the property for its advertising potential taking "about an hour" of our time as promised; but to subject us to over two hours of intensely high-pressure selling. The experience was almost surreal.

The salesman was obviously highly trained, and engaged us in this ludicrous piece of theatre, involving a spurious company history lesson designed to build trust; a guide to the market designed to discredit the competition; mysterious rituals with meaningless (but important-sounding) code numbers to make the potential customer feel like a lucky winner; asking us to sign pointless pieces of paper saying we had understood the presentation, so to get us warmed-up for signing a real-contract. The pressure to take up their credit-plan was extremely strong too - and at times highly misleading. While the salesman was keen to suggest that a huge discount would be applied to the bill just for taking up the credit-plan, and to talk about the potentially low monthly repayment figures, he was far from forthcoming about the total-repayment sum should you use the full ten-years to repay! Likewise his figures for interest did not relate to the amount it would actually cost us for the job he had just measured up for - but simply interest 'per thousand pounds borrowed'. Likewise we were never told whether the interest rates were fixed, or flexible! This was rushed through at enormous speed, followed with the invitation we (unwisely) took, to sign to say we were happy with the presentation. The truth was, we were still digesting it, when the pen and the form were pressed into our hands.

All this comes to the inevitable climax of the sky-high bonkers price, which you get to chew on for a few minutes while he rehearses for the umpteenth-time the benefits of the Argon-filled glass-units and multi-point locking system.... Then comes the call from HQ with the 'good news' about the code number which slashes thousands off the price..... all so predictable. Yet - even as we were wise to what was happening, we felt the huge psychological pressures being brought to bear on us.

When we repeated, and repeated, and repeated that under no circumstances would we be signing a contract as big as this on the night - the salesman refused to accept this answer. He questioned, asked all manner of intrusive questions which we had to repeatedly refuse to answer, questioned again, kept offering to wait outside in the car until we had talked it though. Embarrassingly he just would not let go, despite us asking for the space to cook our tea and deal with the kids! The pressure to sign was then upped with the usual line about these deals only being on offer tonight, and that if we didn't sign now he wouldn't be able to give us the amazing deal we had just seen. When we explained that we would never sign a deal this big on the spur of the moment, he phoned his boss - who then tried to (very assertively) run through the presentation with me again on the phone! Can you imagine?!

I got the impression that the salesman himself was a decent guy, being driven by an unbelievably ruthless company, to operate in a way which stretched the definitions of reasonable, ethical practice to its tolerances! Whether any of it was actually illegal or not, I do not know.

Thankfully we are not weak, vulnerable, elderly or unable to withstand this kind of bombardment - and eventually he left. I had the chance to Google this company and see if this kind of thing goes on regularly - and indeed it does. I also discovered that they are a repeat offender in violating the rules on tele-marketing and in fact should not have been calling me at all!

Their windows look quite good. They seemed strong, warm, secure, and looked fine. The question is this: would I want to do business with a company that (i) violated my TPS registration and illegally cold-called me, (ii) tricked their way into my home under false pretences, (iii) outstayed their welcome by taking double the promised time, (iv) put us under undue psychological pressure, (v) tried to get us to sign up to a credit-scheme without adequate time to consider its terms in detail or compare it with other products, (vi) placed us under pressure to hastily conclude a deal with them for the windows without allowing us time to weigh our options (vii) subjected us to highly-polished theatre and ritual all designed to psychologically manipulate us towards parting with cash? Er,....

I see that consumer discussion boards are deeply divided about this company. Some people report terrible experiences - others will not have a word said against them. I am in no position to generalise about the company, I simply relate my experience. Let the reader decide!

Stumbling Upon the Vinyl Archive. 1. Kids

Yesterday I had to clear out part of our attic to make space for an inspection of the timbers in our roof, which appear to be moving... While raking through its dusty corners I came across a long-forgotten collection of vinyl albums - which I have spent the last couple of evenings looking through and playing. I wasn't surprised to find some of the things I had bought as a teenager (this CD thing will never catch on, I'll buy another LP), but I hadn't remembered that some things from my childhood were in there too!

For me Ringo Starr was never the real voice of Thomas The Tank Engine and Friends, in fact Thomas wasn't even the band's front-man when I was a kid, they were just "The Railway Stories" - and they were read by Johnny Morris. Johnny Morris is probably best remembered for his BBC kids TV series, Animal Magic in which he voiced spoken parts for the animals, with his gentle unique voice, and whimsical wit.

His readings of the Railway Stories were lovely and he brought the characters alive - pompous officials, Imperious Express Engines, wicked trucks - all part of these wonderful stories. When Morris was the story-teller the pictures were better than the subsequent TV series. One of my friends told me recently that he had met Johnny Morris - and that he was as charming and friendly off-camera as he appeared on it. The Railway Stories are things which will always remind me of my two Grandfathers though. Both called "Grandpa", we distinguished between them as "Grandpa-shed" and "Grandpa-piano". Both were very creative; one, making useful things in his shed, the other at his piano, with his Mozart and Scarlatti. Amongst my earliest memories are Grandpa-piano reading Railway Stories to me at his house in Sunbury; and I can remember listening to this Johnny Morris album with Grandpa-shed - who liked copying the character voices too.

Next out of the archive were two albums of songs from Play-School, which was the BBC's flagship Under-5s programme during the 1970s. Brian Cant, Johnny Ball, Toni Archer, Derek Griffiths, Lionel Morton, Chloe Ashcroft, Don Spencer and all the others sang songs which were in turn educational and hilarious, told nursery rhymes, and produced this album which when I was about five I could sing along with word-perfectly. Pulling these albums out of their sleeves yesterday was a bizarre experience!

Of course, I was delighted that I could still remember a few of the songs, with the words! Better still my five-year old daughter was in the room - and it was fun watching her responding to the songs with the pure enjoyment that I had got from them back in the middle-ages. I had wondered if they would 'work' today, or whether in the world of ipods and Nintendo's, they would seem hopelessly quaint. Happily she danced and laughed and was thoroughly absorbed by my little nostalgia-fest. Now of course, I can't get the songs out of head... This isn't too bad when the song in question is a uniformly wonderful as Derek Griffiths' Spider Song. However if you catch me singing, "wouldn't it be funny if the moon were made of cheese - and everybody had to wear balloons around their knees?", be kind!

You crack me up..

If I lie on our bed and look up I can see the cracks that are working their way steadily around the ceiling and into the wall behind the headboard. The initial assessment is that there is a problem with the lintel above the bay window - which may need some bolstering, probably at appalling expense.

"Did the earth move for you, dear?" .... Well, the ceiling appears to have shifted a little.

That was the roof that was

Contraction Fracture

Note - when the dishwasher is on a 'hot' wash programme; don't take any glass object out and immediately fill it with cold water....

A Local Shop!

The phrase, "this is a local shop" surprisingly featured in the top 5 comedy catchphrases of all time. The ghastly premise of the comedy was that the grotesques who manned the shop used it as a front for all manner of degradations and murders.

My experience in Perth over the last few years has been that the opprobrium heaped upon 'the local shop' by that comedy is ill-deserved and worthy of reconsideration. While it is true that some marginal savings can be made by shopping online and trawling for bargain prices, I have found that multi-nationals and faceless .coms provide poor service, lousy aftercare, and ultimately bad value of for money. A few 'local' examples will demonstrate the point (and just so that you know - I'm not getting commission here, these are just personal recommends)

The Beanshop in Perth roasts and sells their own coffee. It's completely fantastic. We've tried various other coffee's, we've used supermarket coffee's and we've sourced cheaper ones too. There are several things that draw us back to the Beanshop though. For a start, the quality of the coffee is the best, then there's the option to have it as beans, ground - and if ground, done so to suit your machine, then there's the whole range of fairly-traded coffees they offer. If you want to drink fair-trade espresso-ground coffee - no-one else will supply that combination for you. Then there's the advice, on coffee making, equipment, contacts for machine servicing, and that's before you come to the fact that visiting the store is worth it to chat to the staff, over a free sample of their coffee of the month. The Bean Shop

I recently bought a second-hand drum-kit for my son. When setting it up, we realised that one of the ratchets on the cymbal stand was completely broken. I took it back into the shop, and without questioning it at all, the owner handed me a brand new boom-stand, which was set up again within an hour. I was very glad I hadn't spent £50 less and got the kit on ebay, from some anonymous seller, who may or may not have co-operated, who may-or-may not have tried to blame the courier, or who may have just said, 'it was fine when I sent it out'. RWJ Drumstore

The customer service we received from the huge chain store Comet, and what we got from local company d3 Audio Visual, couldn't be more different. Comet were a complete disgrace, when the DVD recorder they sold me packed up, their level of customer service was so appalling that I blogged about it here. When d3 installed a surround-sound system for our TV, they gave us a pretty good deal on an ex-demo amp, and installed it for us. When my kids wrecked the install by pressing random buttons on the remote, botching up the lovely sound that d3 had created, they cheerfully came and did it again. Local companies value their reputation, and go the extra mile to protect it. Some companies have such a control of market share, that the individual customer is of no consequence. I haven't set foot in Comet since that experience. I'd go back to d3 in a flash though. d3 Audio Visual

We made a big mistake when we bought a bike last year from Tesco's. It was £30 cheaper than the bikes on offer in the independent bike shop in the town. In retrospect it would have been far, far better to save up the extra £30 and go to a shop who understand bikes. The Tesco bike wouldn't stay in gear. Several bike rides proved very irritating for our son, as the gears clicked, jumped, and constantly slipped. On hills when the gears are under strain, it was unusable. The problem? It's cheaper to use brake cable than gear-changing cable on bikes. The Tesco bike had brake-cabling on the gears. The designed springy-ness of brake cable wrecks the performance of gears. We ended up paying the local shop to bring the Tesco bike up to standard, and that's where all future bikes will come from - even if we have to save a little longer to get them. We bought a bike-rack for the car this Spring. The owner of the bike-shop came out and helped us get it all fitted onto the car for the first time, safely. You don't get that kind of service online! J.M. Richards Cycles.

When we go out for a coffee, we have the choice of the delightful unique French cafe in town or the overpriced, drably impersonal Costa. I find 'chain' cafe's useful in a town I don't know well, as you can walk in, knowing exactly what you can expect. Conversely, what's the point in going to a new town, if every High Street looks exactly the same? No, we'll give Costa a miss and go and enjoy freshly baked croissants instead at Cafe Breazh.

If we need a snack-on-the run in town, we have the choice between The Tower Bakery, who make all their produce within a mile of the town centre - or the halogen-lit garish plasticity of Gregg's, whose wares are driven countless miles around the country. In my opinion there is something rather satisfying in sinking ones teeth into a Tower Bakery Fudge Doughnut, letting the fudge delight the tongue and the custard squirt around the gums like something from a Roald Dahl book! It's even better to add to the sheer indulgence of the experience, the thought that local jobs are protected, and local businesses helped to thrive as I do so. Tower Bakery.

The up-front discounts offered by the multi's, and the .com's can be very alluring - and I have taken advantage of them from time to time. I'm sure I will again, if they are prepared to offer massive discounts. On the other hand - more often than not, their discounts prove to illusory, and what local businesses offer in terms of advice, help, follow-up, customer-service, and friendliness is usually worth a lot more than the marginal savings available online.

Have you had similar experiences? Or are there any local businesses near you that you'd recommend?

A Vase full of Socks

A strange sight in our house today..

The Spot from which I blog

Endlessly Restless recently responded to a challenge posted by Lucy, which I'm going to do as well! The idea is to post snapshots of the place from which you blog, without tidying or re-arranging anything - just presenting it as it actually is!

The contrast with Endlessly Restless' meticulously ordered space and my cluttered existence is quite marked!

Definitely time to tidy up!

Ice Inside & Out

Perth continues to look idyllic in its Arctic cloak, with the hills of the Sma' Glen forming a pure white backdrop to the chimney's and boilers of the town, as they gently smoke and steam in the morning sun. The 'coldest winter for thirty years' isn't all sledging, icicles and picture postcard views though. For a start there has been a severe outbreak of "you think this is bad - you weren't alive in 1963, now that was a real winter, and we didn't have central heating back then either" spreading across the country, affecting all regions by nightfall. Secondly, there have been real problems caused when the icy temperatures haven't stayed in the correct places, ie. up remote Glens with unpronounceable Gaelic names to fluster English newsreaders; and just as importantly, remaining outside the house rather than inside it.

We first noticed that the ice had entered the building when it began to rain inside young Norris' bedroom. As it wasn't raining at the time, and there was an intervening ceiling and roof between the bedroom and any potential rainfall - our Sherlock Holmes like deductive powers led us to suspect the presence of a burst pipe. Locating the source of the leak was similarly brilliantly achieved by looking directly above where water was pouring through the ceiling.

It would be ludicrously anthropomorphic to attribute malice to ice - but you can you think of a better explanation for the fact that the ceiling through which it tipped all this water, was the one I had just finished painting?

The plumber arrived eventually, after we'd spent the day with no central heating, shivering with only a coal fire to heat the house (but try telling that to someone who remembers 1963, they wouldn't believe you). Apparently he'd seen ten of these during the day - frozen condensate pipes from boilers, backing up and spewing water into houses and cutting boilers out. The solution wasn't very high-tech however. It involved sawing the pipe in two, sticking a bucket under the pipe and telling me to remember to "keep emptying it if you want to use the heating".

I'm in two minds. I can either spend the time going up and down to the attic with buckets, or switch the whole thing off, and wait by the fire for the thaw while grumbling and mumbling about life in austerity Britain. 1947 was even worse than 1963 apparently.

Decorating

Hours of cleaning, sanding, polyfilla-ing!










Finally, making progress








At last it looks half-decent

HHmmm, not too bad

Paint

"At all times there must be absolute equity"... this apparently is the golden parenting rule, when you have two boys amongst your collection of offspring. So, having completed the decoration of "Boris'" room; attacking "Norris'" one very shortly thereafter was not a choice to be made, but a job to be done! The house stinks of paint, I stink of paint, all 'Norris' clothes and toys are stacked around the house, (which is descending into chaos), while 'Norris' himself has taken up residence on the floor of our bedroom - a position from which he was last dispatched when he was but a few weeks old!

Decorating is a dreadful job. Messy, malodorous, annoying, expensive, time-consuming and frustrating enough to either purge the mind of any perfectionist tendencies, or alternatively propel a die-hard perfectionist into apoplexy or therapy . Unlike almost every other type of housework however - decorating is something which makes a real difference to the way the house feels, does give a sense of satisfaction in its completion, and which doesn't need to be repeated again within 24hrs!

I'm Hiding

The attic conversion is now finished, the book shelving hung on the walls and we've finished decorating (well all but a few fiddly tidying up bits). The kids have helped me lug one or two boxes of books up the ladder, and stacked them on the shelves, theology to the left, history to the right, politics under the window, fiction over the stairs, maps on the top shelf, humour next to medical texts, below biographies etc etc. Just a little bit of organising to do here now... If things go a bit quiet and you haven't seen me for a while, I am most likely to be found up here, with a book. It is the most convivial of places for the reading of books, do join me next time you are round at ours.

Alien?

The evils that lurk in the darkest recesses of the vegetable cupboard...

maybe it's time for a clear-out!

Attic Additions

The attic is starting to look like a pleasant place to sit, think, read or work. (It'll soon be a mess again once I move all thebooks up here though!)

Amazing to think it's not that long since it looked like this: