He won't use a ladder - lassoing the chimney to climb up will be fine.

Sometimes the things that people do to repair their houses beggars belief. Those of you whop have followed the epic refurbishment of our new house will not have failed to notice that we discovered a lot of - how shall we say - bodge it and scarper repairs and 'improvements'. The scariest up until now as the three pin mains double socket above the bath in the bathroom. You know, for when you really want to sit in six inches of water and make toast. Other gems included bare (live) wires in the wall where a socket plate had been removed. Home brew electrics out to the shed that were made of several lengths of offcuts of cables just twisted together and roof leaks at the front that had been repaired by just painting over the splits in the roofing felt with black household paint.

The previous owners of this house seem to have been very much of the school of "if we can't see it, it isn't happening. La! La! La! I can't hear you!". The carport was condemned when we found serious wet rot that was threatening structural failure of the main cross beam that had been hidden by panelling around the beam with thin plywood, wood filler and a lick of paint to hide the join. Under the bath the outflow was leaking due to - as it turned out - the wrong sized washers being used in the pipe fittings. Their response to the leak and the damage caused to the ceiling beneath? Cut out the square of ruined plasterboard and insert a new scrap piece and paint it. Out of sight and out of mind. Of course, the leak was still there, and eventually came right back through the ceiling.

The utility room has become the latest area to receive a full revamp. The roof had suffered from cowboy repairs, and the whole building was not exactly built to a good standard with signs of wet rot. When the builders arrived and got to work they found a few new horrors buried away. The most bizarre was finding that the walls only went to waist height. Above this level, hidden behind hardboard cladding on the inside and some cheap pine clapboard on the outside, there was nothing. The roof was held up by a couple of pieces of two by two and an old window frame (still with glass in but buried behind the home brew 'improvements'.). We've had a real wall built up, with an inside wall added and insulation in between. The lack of insulation in the old utility room was shocking - more so because the combi boiler is in there. Back when we were having temperatures of -16C, the boiler might as well have been outside for what good a thin layer of hardboard could do to insulate it from the freeze.

That wasn't the biggest horror though. Neither was finding that the roof had been patched with old newspapers dated July 1995 so that we know when the cowboys were here. No. The biggest horror was that the electrics had no fuse. Oh, they had a place for a fuse to go, but instead of a fuse the idiots who lived here before had taken the view that a rolled up wedge of tin foil was far better. Basically, there was no fuse to blow. If you had the misfortune to touch one of the bodged bare wires, you were live until the national grid got bored of giving.

The shocking standards of the electrics in this house (all now put right by visits from properly qualified electricians) just shows that it is about time that houses had to be both gas and electricity certified as safe at the point of sale. Forget all this vacuous energy certificate nonsense - let's have a far more useful system that actually stops dangerous homebrew electrical work being passed on to the unknowing who could end up being killed or seriously injured through the previous owner's criminal incompetence.

A day without the mither.

It's easy to forget how relatively new some technologies are and see how quickly people take for granted something that did not always exist. One of those things is the humble mobile phone. Around twenty years ago, no-one I know apart from my Father had one. Back then, it was something of a brick of a device and had the battery life of a brick in a toilet. Of course, that wasn't too bad as much of the countryside was devoid of any signal that would let it work. At an extortionate cost to ring in or out, the payphone was still King. It was a better device, mind, than the mobile it replaced. That was only mobile by virtue of being permanently attached to his car. The chunky handset hid the fact that the glove compartment was full of electronics, and there was another box of tricks in the boot and an aerial on the rear of the roof.

I used to have twenty pence in change that was for 'emergency phoning'. Most children did. Payphones weren't hard to find either; when I was in Durham there was a cluster of six in the market square alone, and others all within walking distance. Then of course the rise of the mobile phone came, and those awful little devices were soon starting to dictate people's lives. Whereas before people could only ring you if you were by a landline, now they could mither you with crap all day. For the past few years I have detested my mobile, because of the sheer number of people who seem to think they can call it to ask inane questions about things that are not important and that I really don't care about.

So yesterday, I wasn't actually too bothered to find that I had accidentally left the damn think at home when on my way out to pay a work related visit to Daventry. Actually, it made the day rather pleasant. Suddenly there was no constant stream of mithering. No "can you give me a call when you reach Crick?". No "can you call in and visit a customer in Market Dreighton?". All of a sudden it was like working fifteen years ago, and it was just me and the radio and the open road. I quite liked it. Unfortunately I can't get away with leaving my mobile behind every day (I wish I could) but it left me with a feeling that not all new technology is entirely welcomed by me. What was wrong with how we used to communicate? We learnt to ask all the important questions in one go rather than in dribbles throughout the day. We used our initiative rather than always having to phone home for a tinny little voice to spoon feed instructions on how to live our day.

Busy, busy, busy.

There's a new book on its way, and signing invites are already coming in from branches of Waterstones. The book is all finished, edited and about to be ordered from the printers and binders somewhere down south. As a teaser, here's the text I through together for the back cover (not sure if it will be being used exactly like this, as I did it in five minutes whilst on my way out to the day job):

Dead men can’t talk. Dead men tell no tales. That’s what the salvagers always said.

“Do you make a habit of stalking?”
“No.” He thought of Tubs’ message and the Cerberus. “Usually things make a habit of stalking me.”
Now she seemed interested, though it was a fleeting glimpse in her body language that he picked up on. Otherwise, she hid her emotions well.
He decided to lay it all on her, and see what the reaction was. What the hell – if she brushed him off like a piece of dirt, then he hadn’t lost anything. Sooner or later it usually came to that for Dezza.
“I’m here because I’ve got a feeling that something bad is going to happen on this cruise.”

It started out as a holiday cruise of a lifetime. But there were always the nagging thoughts in the back of Dezza’s mind that things weren’t going to be what they seemed. When a voice from the past warns you that something bad is going to happen, it isn’t usually cause for concern. Except Tubs was dead, and the message was clear: the Persia was going to be next.

Doctor in the house!

It is positively scary the colour of the water that comes out of a Rug Doctor after doing the lounge carpet. What was even scarier, was that the water was still a horrible dirty colour after the second go on the same carpet.

In other news: must train myself to stop calling it a Rug Muncher.

The dreaming

I thought of Stephanie again today. I played the whole of the LP 'The Dreaming' by Kate Bush, and it reminded me so much of us singing along to it late at night with the turntable balanced precariously on top of the TV in her bedroom. Even down to trying to work out what the backwards lyrics really were.

The irony is that the turntable and LP are the same ones we used all those years ago. Sat in your lap, babe.