Bog Roll ::

On my way home today, I spotted a cat bounding along to my left. It passed me the cut across my path on the pavement then out into the main road right in front of a passing car. The driver stopped the car at once as he felt the "thump" but the by then then cat had bounded off into someone's garden. The car most definitely hit the cat and there was a puff off white fur, but the cat lept away without even so much as a limp!

posted 17:45 :: /stuff :: permalink :: ^

Our new house has a Hotpoint washing machine in it. We had one before and like the previous model, this one destroys clothes. Yesterday we swapped it for our John Lewis (Electrolux), which not only gets the clothes cleaner it also has the advantage that it doesn't destroy them.

posted 16:48 :: /stuff :: permalink :: ^

I don't like BT. When we moved house BT actually moved the phone line in time, this time. If it wasn't for the annoying call centre operative who was trying to sell me ADSL, everything seemed to go very well.

Today I got a call from my ADSL provider to tell me that they can't set up my line, as the phone number isn't in the "database" yet. I'd call BT but I can't find the paperwork with their paperwork yet - it is somewhere in the house I'm just not sure...

posted 15:55 :: /stuff :: permalink :: ^

Over the weekend we moved house again. Our last landlord like the preceding one chose to try and sell the house from under us. The preceding landlord failed to sell and was forced to put the house back on the rental market - having missed the peak of the boom by about six months.

The new house is marginally larger than the two previous ones and significantly better built than the previous one. We hope that the current house will be only a temporary move our plans to but our own house are progressing and with luck we'll only be here for month or two.

We are gradually getting good at the house moving game. So far as we unpack, nothing seems to have been broken and everything appears to be in order. When we eventually move for the last time, I hope things will go as well.

posted 15:47 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

Just as most other governments are advising people not to use Microsoft IE, the British government is actually encouraging people to use it. It's utter insanity...

Government advice: Browse safely with Microsoft (sic).

Anyone who knows anything about the Internet would not let a child use it unsupervised or use IE when there are many better and safer browsers to choose. Yet again the UK government in the pocket of Microsoft.

posted 22:17 :: /web :: permalink :: ^

Yesterday I needed to write a cheque. It took me several minutes to find my cheque book and then I had to check the correct order to write the sum and name. I wrote two cheques each in 2007 and 2008 and none in 2009. It's a wonderfully quaint and obsolete process, perfectly suited for solicitors and estate agents!

To be honest, estate agents and our solicitor do communicate with email and even do electronic funds transfers, but still an awful lot of paper still moves about in the post!

posted 18:56 :: /stuff :: permalink :: ^

The house hunting goes well. After 8 years of searching we have finally found a house that we would like to buy. We have put in an offer that has been accepted and now we are in the infuriating state between acceptance and completion which could last weeks to months, or fall through, as one in three often do.

We have even found a house to rent to bridge the gap between our current property and our possible new one. Other than the inconvenience of a forced move we could do without, things are actually going rather well.

posted 18:31 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

The past few week has not been good for them. They have very serious security defects in all version of Internet Explorer from as far back as records go up to and including the very latest version in Windows 7. Several governments have formally recommended that users do not use IE of any version until it's fixed.

To make matters worse it now transpires that they knew about the problem some time ago and even when exploits were being used they did nothing about it.

Using Microsoft products is one long pathetic patch process. You buy, you hope, you patch, you patch again and finally you start again at buy...

No sane person starting today would ever deploy anything from Microsoft, the only reason anyone uses their products today is because of ignorance, inertia and the fact even if they want to change they are trapped (addicted?).

posted 17:53 :: /unix :: permalink :: ^

Over the past few weeks I've been mostly wearing socks with a high wool or Coolmax content. They are less common than socks made out of cotton and often don't come in fun colours or patterns. Yesterday I put on a pair of cotton socks, I wish I hadn't, I had a blister before I even made it to work.

Note to self: get rid of all cotton socks and replace with wool/synthetic mixed socks.

posted 21:06 :: /stuff :: permalink :: ^

The UK has the smallest average sized homes of the "developed" countries, about one third the size of a typical Australian house. The UK also has some of the most poorly built modern houses and a large body of inefficient and in need of replacement old houses.

For most of the last half decade house building has been a mixture of shoddy standard and poor design and worst of all far too few houses have been built, constantly missing targets for decades at a time. The Overall result is that houses are absurdly expensive and stupidly small. They are probably the wost value for money anywhere in the "developed" world.

An "average house" is now well above the acceptable level at which a mortgage is normally lent to someone on "average income". In 2003 the national average ratio was around 3.4 by the height of the boom it had reached 5.1. This is utterly insustainable in the long run and has been a contributing factor in the recent price correction.

Because a sensible house it so stupidly expensive in the UK, an absurd concept of a "buying ladder" has developed. You buy a house you can afford but don't want, pay some mortgage off on it, then after a few years you sell it and buy a bigger one and so on until you arrive at the house you do want. Given that house prices tended to rise faster than inflation in the 70s and 80s this would mean each trade up you could use the gain in property prices of the lower rung to fund the deposit on the higher rung. The fact that the rungs tend to get farther apart as house prices rise, was silently ignored by the bulk of the population.

When we moved to the village the "normal UK" thing to do would have been to buy a house and by now we'd be on our second or third house. Instead we chose to rent and even though we are being forced into our third house I still think we are ahead financially. If we had bought the first house we lived in for the price it was probably worth then of about £180k it would now be worth around £200-210k, a capital gain of £20-30k. We would have paid a monthly mortgage of at least £1k, or at least £250 per month more than our rent, which over the years means we have saved more than the house would have appreciated. Over the years we would have paid some of the mortgage off but we'd have also had much higher maintenance and service charges for owning the house and that excludes all the legal costs.

As it happens we have actually save considerably more than above figure, so other the inconvenience of having to probably move twice this year we should be able to buy the house we (nearly) really want this year with less of a problem than if we had done the "normal" thing.

PS. Trying to explain a house buying ladder to foreign relatives is very hard - it seems so illogically!

posted 16:23 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

We made it home without any delays. Our trains were running bang on time, well 1 minute late into Basingrad - but that counts as on-time... It had snowed, just as the news said, but was hardly 20 cm, more like 5 cm. Not a problem to anyone on foot with decent shoes but I'm sure it caused chaos for car drivers.

posted 20:38 :: /stuff/holiday :: permalink :: ^

Because of severe snowfalls in Kent customers were offered free travel another day deals in Paris this morning. At the moment we are speeding though the Kent country side looking out at the pretty but not very light dusting of snow. I suppose they got their fingers burnt badly in the run up to XMas, so they are taking no chances today, even if there is barely enough snow for a decent snow ball fight...

posted 14:09 :: /stuff/holiday :: permalink :: ^

Yesterday when we checked the evening news we discovered that southern England was under a blanket of snow - and not the feeble "pretend" snow of 2009, a real fall of 20-30 cm.

We checked and the national rail services seem to be running okay and Eurostar are running a mostly okay service, so we decided to try our luck and set of home from Paris.

We arrived at Gare du Nord in time and went through security and border control without a problem. The gates opened on time and we made it to our carriage only to be sent to another one. We legged it all the way to the other end of the train and we are now sitting in business class. They still don't have enough power sockets but that should be okay, as long as we are not delayed anywhere.

posted 12:17 :: /stuff/holiday :: permalink :: ^

One of my favourite eating apple varieties is the English Egremont Russet. It's different from the bland modern apples that are nothing more than bags of wet sugar. While on holiday in France this New Year, I came across a relative, the Reinette grise du Canada, a popular French variety of russet that came from England via Canada. It's a older variety and slightly larger in size, but very similar in texture and flavour - well worth finding.

posted 19:10 :: /stuff/food :: permalink :: ^

What I have been expecting for some time has happened. The national media has been hyping houses to death and no doubt our "unwilling-landlord" has decided that now is the best time to evict us and sell their house.

It's their house and I have no problem with them trying to sell it, to be honest we don't like it, it's small, cold and poorly built, however moving is a royal pain in the arse and a "notice to quit" is such a lovely Christmas present. Given that winter is the absolute low point in the UK property market and we lose a fortnight to Christmas and New Year it's going to be really dreadful to find another hovel to rent in time...

This has happened before, and as last time our only consolation is that with property prices again falling and things expected to get noticeably worse next year, my landlord is probably going to be worse off than me by the end of next year.

posted 09:07 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^