The family opposite had a Sky TV dish installed this morning. I watched as the engineer got ready to mount the satellite dish up on the wall. If he had been preparing to enter the core of a nuclear reactor he couldn’t have had more safety equipment.
With hard hat, goggles, mask, earplugs and gloves he drilled a hole in the wall and fitted a metal eye. This was just to lash the ladder. Then he donned a safety harness and clipped himself onto the ladder. Climbing all of two metres he drilled the wall and attached the dish.
After completing the installation he stood back, admired his work and smoked a cigarette.
We have been getting used to our new central heating system since the controls were all wired in a fortnight ago. I took a wrench to the hall radiator valve and adjusted it right down, which has solved the issue of a hot hall triggering the new wall thermostat and consequently preventing the boiler from warming the rooms.
I thought that was the end of our problems, but
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We had a new gas boiler installed today. The old Vulcan it replaced was simple and reliable but it sent a lot of heat up the flue (more on the flue later). It also heated up the cellar which did at least give us a laundry drying room.
The hot water storage cylinder in the loft also got replaced – with one encased in foam lagging so we no longer have to have a pile of old blankets and duvets on top of it.
The flue was attached to the back of the house and ran right up beyond the eaves. Being made of asbestos,
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How time flies. I returned to Gibraltar today, some 44 years 33 days since my last visit. I was on my way to a university friends reunion in Medina Sidonia, Spain.
The Rock looms majestically as you step off the aeroplane, just as the warmth hits your skin. A heart-lifting double whammy; a confusing, delightful product of air travel. This place is only 2½ hours from gloomy Manchester!
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“The idea that we have known where he is and we could have gotten him anytime, that just isn’t the case.”
said Chief Inspector of the US Marshals Service Thomas Hession. Well, as Polanski’s agent Jeff Berg says,
“How hard would it be to find someone shooting a major film in a European country? He travels with transparency across Europe. It makes no sense.”
If it takes 30 years to capture Roman Polanski, then don’t expect them to get Osama Bin Laden any time soon.
Steve Earle played the Bridgewater Hall tonight as part of his Townes tour, just him and acoustic guitar. At first I was disappointed that there was no backing band but his energetic playing and big personality filled the auditorium.
The guy clearly idolises his late friend and mentor Townes Van Zandt – with whom he shares some pretty self-destructive traits – and most of the set was devoted to him. Between songs Earle shared his refreshingly liberal political views and gave the audience a glimpse of his wayward past – heroin addict, alcoholic, jaibird.
A great evening, but what Hallé conductor Sir John Barbirolli would have made of this troubled troubador playing here I cannot say.
It looks like Manchester’s Urbis gallery might become the home of a National Football Museum instead.
Good. Not that I have any appreciation of the game. I watch a football match on TV with the same level of comprehension as our cat. We can both see coloured shapes moving around on the screen but that’s about it. But Urbis has been a white elephant from the start.
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For a long time I have been meaning to cancel a Spanish telephone line. When my parents overwintered there, it made sense to have a phone. But now the place is used just for holidays and in any case we now have mobiles.
I have been putting it off because I had read horror stories about Telefonica customer services, and indeed had experienced their bureaucratic maze myself several years ago. That was when I tried to return the old rotary dial handset which was on rental, to replace it with a pushbutton handset I had bought.
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I was on the motorway today and passed a car which had stopped on the hard shoulder. Its elderly occupants had got out and were dutifully standing next to the vehicle in the drizzle waiting for assistance.
What kind of unthinking adherence to safety advice results in this absurd risky behaviour from four presumably rational people?
“Quick, get out!”
“Er, but it’s raining.”
“Get out! Get out! It’s not safe.”
“Hmm. I see what you mean. Another vehicle could leave the carriageway and plough into our car.”
“Exactly. So get out and stand next to it. Then you will be invincible.”
I saw this sign today in a Merseyrail station:
HELP POINT – inside BT Telephone
Nice to know help is always at hand.
They are even more helpful at Levenshulme station in Manchester. The station name is actually shown in Sign Language.
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