“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
Soren Kierkegaard
We all know MPs are detached from reality but they do keep on offering us more examples of this.
For instance, read this article on plans to ban pavement parking. Pause for a moment to wonder just where in the UK in might not work?
Yes, you’ve guessed it, good old Bradford where the natives have yet to differentiate between the pavement and the bit in the middle in most parts of the city.
Of course you can well imagine our Council being ever so keen to enforce this should, of course, the lazy bastards in Parliament ever return to work to pass any laws. I suppose if we did live in a law-abiding city then it may not be such a bad idea.
There may well also be a law of the unintended consequence; imagine house builders having to build estates with enough room for cars? MPs voting for this might not be doing their chances of a cushy non-exec role to wind down their days. Still, I suppose they could always join the Lib Dems.
Redemption?
What you may ask is that? Well, the story starts some 45 years ago at St George’s Middle School. I was never brilliant at anything at school but I was definitely crap at a few things, notably anything remotely practical.
My efforts at woodwork were amongst the worst our teacher could recall; in metalwork I was just as bad and my toffee hammer collapsed at the first collision with toffee. But my miserable effort at a toast rack, kept to this day by my Mum as much in bewilderment at how utterly useless her eldest was, has haunted me.
So, with a bit of time on my hands – honestly – I had an idea. Having spent a bit of time over the winter with Jimmy the Joiner, surely I could make something from a load of old fence posts? How about a carrot box, with high walls to halt the hop of the dreaded carrot fly? I set to work with only a drill and a rusty stolen saw from my Dad.
Et voila! The self-build house beckons?
A Cautionary Tale
I’ve long held the view that one of the next miss-selling scandals would be solar panels, to be followed by equity release. This story – here – would suggest that this may well be true. The inevitable gold rush that followed the Government offering seemingly generous feed-in tariffs brought with it a raft of new entrants to the market.
Several years ago, curious and with time on my hands – a recurring theme – I researched the market. Several things struck me as blatantly obvious, most notably that the “reps” looked like they had found the Klondyke Land, the rich oceans of insurance, double glazing and financial advice all having dried up. In short, same old badly dressed chancers, same old bullshit.
The second most obvious thing was that recovering your up-front investment required financial models worthy of the Treasury to even begin to make a decent guess as to whether this was possible. In my view, it simply was not, albeit that I was not on the first wave of applicants. That said, although feed-in tariffs have been cut back, so too have the cost of panels.
What killed this half-dead proposal off – apart from the dodgy black leather jacket and red shirt one salesman wore to a “presentation” clearly in awe of The Fonz – was that you had no guarantee what a bunch of sub-contracted “roofers” paid by the job would be doing on your roof.
If solar panels are such a good idea then surely housebuilders would be forced or financially encouraged to install these? Somewhere in between a no-brainer and a non-started there lies a truth?
The Ashes
The gulf between the Aussies and England, no matter how many excuses we offer to protect those with vested interests and cushy numbers, is massive. Equally, given the obsession with pyjama cricket in this country, it will only get wider.
Well played Australia.
Just Another Day At The Asylum
On the same day the Muppets at City Hall signed-off on a staggering £1.4m to fund their ridiculous bid for UK Capital of Culture 2025, a sum of money that defies belief unless you are called Jemima and work in Marketing, came this story.
The very same Council, who claimed footfall for last year’s Christmas lights spectacular of 200,000, now say the “difficult decision” not to run the event was down to budget cuts and cost pressures due to reduced government funding for local Councils.
Remember the Bingley Music farce – How Bradford Council Wastes Your Mone – how good to see the event taking place the other week run by private enterprise.
Once again they blame central Government for their woeful financial follies.
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