Open House

We got back from Montreal on Monday to realise that we had missed London’s annual Open House weekend. Normally I (and now with Dave willingly in tow, we) make a big effort to make the most of the opportunity to explore behind the scenes at some of London’s both well- and lesser-known landmarks. On previous years, I’ve been to the Bank of England and the derelict hotel of St Pancras chambers and last year we had a thoroughly grand day out. We started at the insanely opulent Foreign Office and then, since it was next door, went into the Treasury, which had been vastly renovated since my last visit, though sadly the tour no longer included the chance to go round Gordon Brown’s office, which was previously the main highlight. Then it was over the road to St Stephen’s Hall, Westminster and through the tunnel to Portcullis House. Then, as I had worked for them by proxy for four years, we continued on to Channel 4 HQ on Horseferry Road. After much anticipation on my part, there wasn’t really much to see there, as Channel 4 is a commissioner rather than a maker of programmes. Just lots of computers in open-plan offices, a smart roof terrace and some funkily shaped glass. After lunch in the Lowlander in Covent Garden, we then hopped over the road to see the Freemasons Hall, which has to be one of the scariest places in the world. With its strange mix of Roman, Egyptian, Greek and Christian theology, combined with gilded mosaic, stunning stained glass and workers tools in aprons, you really had no clue as to what they might get up to inside the temple. Child sacrifice was high on my list of suspicions. Finally, we went south of the river to Ken’s pad, City Hall, from where our London day was so perfect that Tower Bridge immediately opened before us when we set foot on Norman Foster’s balcony.

So this year we missed out, though my dad seems to have trekked round quite a few places in our absence. (It’ll be the one and only time in his life that he heaps praise upon an institution such as Ernst & Young, that’s for sure.) We also missed Open Squares weekend this year as it clashed with Vicky’s wedding. Last year we spent a lovely day trailing around the gardens of Bloomsbury and Kensington, seeing how the other half live, as well as climbing up to a couple of exotic roof terraces. By the time these open days come round again, we may not be living in London any more.

Montreal was great, despite being only blocks away from the high school shooting when it happened (though thankfully we were blissfully unaware of this at the time) and Minnie, the friend we were visiting, being stuck in bed with a lousy flu for most of the week we were there. Still, she offered us plenty of "open house" hospitality of her own in her beautiful new apartment, bought for a mere 85K with more square footage than Dave and I could ever dream of owning in the UK. Montreal’s a classic example of how much richer a place can be once all the stupid English-speakers leave. It’s such a wonderful, cosmopolitan city, with vibrant neighbourhoods, glorious parkland, decent public transport (at least within its urban core), fine markets serving fresh, organic produce, and a vast array of fabulous restaurants and bars, where each day could be rounded off with top-notch Quebecois beer and iced cider. Our first day was spent getting over our jetlag at a spa in the Laurentians, nestled beside a roaring river and steep hills layered with trees showing the first tinges of autumn. We also managed a trip to Quebec City, which is somewhat twee, but in the nicest possible way, even if some of the stupid English speakers have returned as tourists.

We at least came back to a finished bathroom, though the shower doesn’t work properly any more.

REBECCA

Haranguing

Since irritating millionairess-heiress Lynne Featherstone appeared on the local Lib Dem scene and her cronies have substantially increased their number of seats in our borough of Haringey without gaining overall control, the tiny Labour majority that is left seem to have resolved to piss on Crouch End from a great height. Over the past few months we’ve seen them try to force through a Controlled Parking Zone without any attempt at a sensible assessment of (or consultation about) local needs and announce their plans to sell off the Town Hall car park to a property developer to create several new apartments with nowhere to leave their cars at all - which would be fine if every resident were prepared to be green and stick to public transport, which alas is unlikely in an affluent area such as this. We’ve also seen them start to chop trees down on Crouch End’s leafy (and supposedly protected) avenues and a total lack of opposition to all the chain stores that have moved into the Broadway, forcing up rents and bankrupting many local independent shops and restaurants and leaving a worrying amount of boarded-up buildings.

I’ve just walked to the Broadway and back to run a few errands in preparation for our trip to Montreal tomorrow (booked before we realised we’d have to spend £2,000 on domestic repairs in a single month, otherwise we’d have stuck to something more economical like a visit to a few of our various relatives in Cumbria). I had to step over more dog shit than I’ve ever seen on a pavement before and at least five different patches of smashed glass bottles, including one on the path in lovely Stationers Park which is full of toddlers playing. It seems Labour Haringey won’t be content until all the Lib Dem voters of Crouch End have been forced to live in something resembling a no-go Tottenham ghetto.

REBECCA

Cock-A-Leaky

Dave and I have endured a month of domestic hell, and it’s all thanks to the morons we bought our flat off believing that they had property development skills. DIY and property development have become a national obsession. Everyone’s dream is to make a fast buck by buying up a cheap deathtrap and then literally plastering over the cracks to a sufficient level to con an estate agent into overvaluing the end result and some naïve first-time buyer into purchasing it. If you can get Sarah Beany, Andrew Winter or even Phil and Kirstie to join you in your hashed-up endeavours and make you famous for fifteen minutes’ worth of Channel 4’s property programmes portfolio, so much the better.

This month, Dave and I have had to rip out our old bathroom because it was leaking into the downstairs flat. This has been an on-off problem for the past two-and-a-half years and, whilst we’ve done our best to patch it up, eventually our downstairs neighbour put her foot down and demanded that the whole lot be redone properly. The problem stems of course from the fact that the new bathroom (put in hurriedly six months before the flat was put on the market) had been incorrectly installed by the previous owners. Tiles had not been attached with waterproof adhesive, and ones that had split when stuck around the bath taps had been left rather than redone. The bath also wobbled, meaning that tiles were continuously being ripped from the wall, the grout was cracking, the sealant tearing and water was getting behind and rotting the plasterboard, as well as dripping through the ceiling below.

Employing a trustworthy but slow Polish builder (one who’d been in the UK long enough to pick up some British builder habits like starting one job and then disappearing off on another after a couple of hours’ work), we then had to watch our bathroom turn into an empty hole, our lounge fill up with everything that had once been in the bathroom, plaster dust cascade onto everything else and our lives turn into misery. Living as a couple in a small one-bedroom flat can feel cramped at the best of times, but add in this kind of upheaval and it gets to be a serious struggle.

But our problems didn’t end there. The stopcock in our hall cupboard had been used for the first time in three years to turn off the water supply to the bathroom to de-install the bath and sink, and shortly afterwards, it ruptured. We received a frantic phonecall from our downstairs neighbour, who was rightly panicking because water was cascading into her hallway. This was of course in the evening long after the builder had finished work for the day, so we had to pay £200 for an emergency plumber to come out and rescue the situation. It took him five minutes (I’m going to become a plumber if that’s the kind of money you can earn for such little effort) to replace the broken stopcock and oh, surprise surprise, tell us that it had been the wrong type of stopcock for a mains water supply anyway. Anyway, the water leak was stalled but we’ll now have to pay for even more of the downstairs flat to be decorated than before. Hopefully insurance will cover the cost – and we should, I suppose, be grateful for the small mercy that the waterfall didn’t come into contact with any expensive suede furniture or electrical items.

Then, to cap it all, a faint smell of gas in our kitchen started to linger whenever the back door was closed, which we eventually traced to one of the hob rings. We called out Transco who confirmed that there was indeed a leak and condemned the hob. So Dave and I were now paying £1,250 in mortgage a month for a flat we could neither cook nor wash in. Advised to simply buy a new hob rather than try to repair the existing one, a gas engineer came out the following week to install the replacement. On removing the old one we heard the usual “Oh. My. God.” that every workman utters on unearthing Mark and Vicky’s handiwork. The gas supply to the old hob was of course entirely inadequate, if not slightly lethal, consisting of a single floppy hose which may have just about been sufficient for a barbecue in the back garden. So he had to then spend two hours building a proper pipe network behind the oven so that he could install the new hob safely.

Wishing to kill two birds with one stone, we’d asked the gas engineer to service the boiler while he was here. However, he immediately said that this was impossible, as Mark and Vicky, while putting in either the boiler or the kitchen, depending on which came first, in a chicken and egg scenario, had neglected to leave the compulsory five millimetre gap between the boiler and the adjacent cupboard to allow service engineers to remove the boiler hood. Obviously we could have got the boiler serviced if we’d removed the cupboard, but given that at that moment in time we were living with our bathroom in the lounge and not a spare inch of floor space, that had to wait a while.

Over the past three years we’ve also had to deal with a cracked kitchen floor that had not been fixed down with flexible adhesive, do major roof repairs, rebuild a front step that kept collapsing because no one had noticed that there was an open coal hole beneath it, and sort out various other messes, only some of which our surveyor had spotted.

Things are looking slightly better now. The bathroom is back in the bathroom, but we can’t use it yet because the builder hasn’t got round to laying the new lino floor. We can however cook again without risking explosion or poisoning, and our downstairs neighbour hasn’t reported any new leaks in the past couple of weeks. We’ve still got to replace some faulty guttering as water rolls off that over our bedroom window whenever it rains. But hopefully after that we’ll get some respite from leaks, Dave or I will get a new job and we’ll be able to move somewhere bigger and more rural before the house gets subsidence or we all get electrocuted.

And our next property will be somewhere completely unrenovated, so we’ll have the chance to make sure that all DIY is in fact DI-someone professional.

Why I’ll Never Be A Blogger

In an idle moment between episodes of The Sopranos at work today, I indulged in a spot of narcissism and Googled myself. Previous searches had revealed an ever-increasing number of people who share my name, some aged as young as 14, or some who’ve been dead for around 300 years. I’d always thought my surname was reasonably unusual (Lewis Carroll aside), since nobody’s ever been able to spell it. If I could have been bothered to change my name when we got married, my namesakes would multiply rapidly. I may even have got away with pretending that I had a sideline in producing Ken Loach films (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0639780/).

But Google usually located three incidences that were me – a Norwegian website advertising a Tallis Scholars music DVD that I project-managed a couple of years ago, a letter about Virgin trains that I had published in the Guardian after several of our wedding guests had a 9-hour journey from hell back to London from Oxenholme station, and then a film database that a friend’s husband set up and made me register on when he only had about four other members and was desperately trying to bolster his numbers with anyone he knew vaguely connected with the movie industry.

However, to my great surprise, Google has now picked up on this blog. It’s quite a frightening prospect to realise that complete strangers, or even long-lost acquaintances, can now readily access these somewhat stilted and infrequent ramblings. I suddenly panicked that there might be several entries that were libellous or grossly offensive. Would my relatives mind discovering that I spent a lot of last summer pouring out my agony at Mum’s death in a public domain? Would I suddenly get peed-off comments from celebrities I’ve spotted in Crouch End? But in reality most of my entries are probably no better, worse, or more or less tedious than many of the other blogs out there.

But I’m a crap blogger: I just don’t have, or make, the time to post daily. I am envious of people who do, since I enjoy writing but find too much of my day is spent staring at a computer screen for someone else’s benefit which doesn’t leave me with enough creative energy to continue doing so for my own purposes once I get home. I have about fully-formed 30 blog entries in my head that remain unwritten, some of which may even be interesting to other people. Others such as "Despite its claims, Windolene really is very smeary" and "Why does Boots in Crouch End never have anything I want in stock?" are best left in some desolate recess of my brain. If I end up without freelance work for a while again (which is looking likely), I might get around to finally typing up some of them, though they’d all have to be back-dated. Which of course contravenes the fundamental idea of a blog.

I do write a diary every night, and have done so for the last 20 years bar one, but I’d never be prepared to abandon pen and paper to create an electronic version of that, and certainly not to publish it into a potentially world-wide space. Whilst Dave and I do get up to an awful lot more than gets blogged about, most of my diary entries still read along the lines of “Got up, messed about, went to bed” or are in a Bridget-Jones-after-a-bottle-of-Chardonnay slanted hand, “Grrrreallybloodygoodeveninnngbutcrapjourneyhome, mmmm,pissedagainwhy didI havethatlastpint?” I may occasionally remember to mention an earth-shattering news event but half the time I’m too half-asleep to do anything other than clear my head before hitting the pillow. Plus Dave’s supposed to write entries in this blog too, which he doesn’t do in my diary.

REBECCA