Wind and Rain - Wet or Dry?

I wrote recently about how this house is now warm and dry (see this post), and the recent weather has reinforced that view.  The wind and rain have been causing issues both to the Grade I listed church opposite, and to the 12 year old house of a friend who had water ingress affecting her electrics and security alarm. In both cases I went to investigate and the cause was the same - the driving wind from the south-west forcing water into cracks in the wall and gaps along flashing.

On the church there were small leaks at various places along the south arches where the nave meets the south aisle. As a result I had to go on the south aisle roof (on Christmas Eve!) to investigate and found that the flashing was pointed with cement which had come away from the limestone above, leaving a 2-3mm gap.  Since it was cement already I overcame my inbuilt resistance and used some fairly wet cement mortar to fill in this gap; however, it is a good illustration of why you shouldn't use cement on a limestone building - the cement is rigid and so will crack when the lead expands in the heat, whereas lime mortar is much more tolerant. At some time we will get all this cement out and have the job done properly with lime, but of course I couldn't do such a repair in this cold and wet weather.

The friend's house was perhaps more surprising: the water ingress was where the low front porch joined the front wall of the 2-storey house and at a quick glance from the ground it all looked OK. However, closer investigation using a ladder revealed cracks in the pointing of the front wall of the house, and some very poor pointing using mastic on the lead flashing at the join. In fact, there was what looked like the proper exterior mastic but also some clear mastic which really looked like internal stuff which someone had applied when a similar event had occurred before our friend bought it; of course, the newer stuff was no longer stuck to the older stuff so my recommendation was to get someone to sort the mastic properly and, perhaps, fill the pointing cracks at the same time. Of course, I am still officially convalescing so I didn't want to volunteer myself, even though I do have the necessary tools.

On the plus side, our own house has stoutly resisted the weather and has only ever had water ingress at one point - a southerly wind can force rain onto and under the front door despite a decent weatherboard and some cunning work by me on the doorstep. We use a bit of newspaper to mop it up and otherwise ignore it! As I look out now on New Year's Eve and see the rain still falling, at least I can feel content with this house being warm and dry - now I must go and check the church...

Doesn't Time Fly?

Yesterday was my grandson's third birthday; he was born the day after all that snow fell in Dec 2010.  I can remember so clearly that I was busy the whole day doing the laths on the back bedroom ceilings  - it was freezing cold in the house - while the snow fell and fell until it was 8 or 10 inches deep. I wrote this entry a few days later, but here's another photo from that time:

That one was taken in the back garden of the dreadfully cold and badly designed rented house that we had at the time. That house (built in 1999) just never got warm, even in July, and a modern house surely should not allow the internal hot water pipes to freeze between the boiler and the bathroom! This house of ours, however, did warm up when the walls had dried out after all the sources of dampness had been tackled; the old thick walls are now a heat reservoir which helps the house to be warmer than outside in winter and cooler than outside in summer. Old methods are more effective than badly done new ones!

Anyway, back to my grandson. I did not realise how much fun a grandchild would be, especially now that he has reached the stage of learning things and asking questions. Every time we see him he comes out with some new bit of learning, like switching on the room lights. Of course, I am fairly pleased that he wasn't our own child when we heard about him being unwell last weekend! However, he was better yesterday and really enjoying opening his presents, blowing candles out and eating chocolate cake. Oh to be young again.

Don't You Just Love Amazon?

Apologies for the off topic post!

I no longer buy things from Amazon; I have never bought much but over time I have come to really dislike everything that they stand for – basically maximising profit regardless of the effect on individuals, companies or countries.

The booksellers’ started it. They are the ones who not only let the embryo Amazon get a foot in the door, but they didn’t realize that this was the thin end of the wedge which was actually very thick. They must have thought that having a contract with a small new on-line company would just help them sell more books, and didn’t seem to appreciate either the potential scale of Amazon’s ambitions or the effect of the contracts that they signed. It obviously never occurred to them that Amazon would be able to use the generous discount which the retailers gave to undercut them to the extent that Amazon would then achieve a huge market share. This then allowed Amazon to control the market to the extent that the retailers would then not be able to do without Amazon! Very clever stuff from Amazon, and you have to hand it to them that as a business plan it succeeded fantastically well.

From selling books successfully, someone at Amazon realized that the same infrastructure could be used to sell anything non-perishable. (In fact, of course, they try to pretend that you actually can buy absolutely anything; you must have noticed that silly thing that appears on a Google search for, say, “Barack Obama” which says “Buy Barack Obama at Amazon”?) That decision, plus a good amount of investment, has made Amazon into the leading on-line retailer and a real force to be reckoned with. As the holder of an MBA, I cannot help but admire their success; I bet that there are now case studies which teach these new ethics to the current MBA students all across then country.

However, there are several separate reasons for my aversion: firstly, their business model seems intent on driving everyone else out of business. They started with bookshops and are now aiming at many other high street shops. Such market dominance has probably often been the aim of many companies, but I doubt that many, if any, have succeeded to the same extent. Frankly you have to wonder where it will end – do they want to control the whole world? Shades of the Inner Party in Oceania out of Orwell’s “1984”?

Secondly, as is well known, Amazon doesn’t pay much (if any) UK corporation tax. They do this legally as it is the avoidance of tax by legal means as opposed to illegally evading tax, and I'm amazed that this is still possible as international conglomerates have been around for ages.  However, I really hope that before long there will be some provision for forcing Amazon and other companies such as Starbucks and Google to pay tax on profit earned as a result of UK operations. The only benefit that this country derives from such companies is that they provide employment for people in this country, but that brings me on to my third point:

The employment practices of Amazon are nothing better than third-world sweat-shop exploitation. The recent Panorama programme (see this link to the BBC iPlayer) reveals the methods behind their efficient and prompt despatch of your item ordered so easily on your PC. In it, the undercover reporter reveals how he spent every shift picking your orders from the shelves in a vast warehouse, with a computer telling him how many seconds he has for each one before he is judged to be going too slowly.  The pressure is relentless and experts are produced to pronounce how harmful this is to one’s health. Is this really the type of employment that this country deserves?

 I cannot now bring myself to order anything at all from Amazon.