Is This What Ed Milliband Needs?
Popbitch has pointed me to this site, which shows Newt Gingrich with various pets.
Perhaps Ed Milliband needs petswithed.com? Or perhaps we don’t?
Never Buy A House That’s Had Tenants In it!
When I bought my house about eighteen months ago, I liked it. I also got a good discount as it needed some work, as the tenants who’d occupied it on behalf of the previous owner hadn’t looked after it.
I still like it, but the faults in the various systems are a complete pain in the neck.
The cooker put in by the previous owner is totally unsuitable.
An Unsuitable Cooker
In common with every other appliance, there are no instruction manuals, but the biggest problem is that it is too big and stops the doors of the kitchen cupboards opening properly. It’s also a gas cooker, which I hate and the sooner, I can get rid of it and fit a proper electric cooker the better. To be fair to Baumatic, they did at least send me a manual, but that doesn’t help with its unsuitability.
The dishwasher has been wrecked and although it is a good make and I have the knowledge to make it work, I have decided that the best option is to get a new one, as all the baskets and shelves are broken and to get everything clean, you need to wash half the glasses and plates by hand afterwards.
But my biggest moan with the house is the underfloor heating system. When nPower fitted the new meter, they advised me to service the boiler which I did. It also needed a new control system, as the previous owner or the tenants had rewired things themselves.
It now works very intermittently, with the result the house is either stone cold or frighteningly hot. In cold weather, I have to ratchet up the controls and switch the boiler off and on to get any heat.
At least I’ve got hot water, although for the last few days the showers haven’t worked. I thought today, I’d have a bath, and I did, but then the water didn’t run out. Although to be fair it did eventually.
I can’t wait to sell my house in Suffolk, so I can get someone in to fix it all here properly.
I lost count of the number of times, I’ve phoned plumbers and they’ve said they’ll come and haven’t. But then there isn’t much work about!
I do have one worry about the heating and that is the problem might be that the house wasn’t very well insulated by Gerry the builder. So is heating the house, is a bit like pushing water uphill?
Roll on the spring, when I can switch it off.
Kaletsky on America
Anatole Kaletsky in The Times is one of my favourite commentators and I usually read what he says.
Today’s missive, The New World is slipping behind the times, is unlikely to go down very well with those conservative Republicans whose main aim seems to be to take America back to the good old days, when men were men and preachers were preachers. Women, blacks and other second class citizens did what they were told.
This paragraph is one of many, that doesn’t pull any punches.
The US is the only major country not even to have considered adopting the metric system, and which still uses fahrenheit instead of celsius and refuses to publish railway and airline timetables using the 24-hour clock. And then there are the scarily anachronistic social views, ranging from the death penalty to creationism over evolution.
America is going down a very small dead-end. We had better not follow them!
You have to admire Kaletsky to get the death penalty, metrication and evolution in one paragraph.
A Working One Hundred Year Old Power Station
You may think that it is a bit unusual that a power station commissioned in 1902 is still generating electricity.
Greenwich Power Station
Greenwich Power Station is quite small with the chimneys just fifty-five metres high.
Admittedly, it is only a standby power station these days and uses modern gas turbines to generate the electricity rather than the original steam engines.
There’s some more information and pictures here.
You’re Never Far From a Rat in London
I took this picture on the Greenway by the ViewTube yesterday.
You're Never Far From a Rat in London
As I was standing on top of the Northern Outfall Sewer, which lies under the Greenway, I suppose this is to be expected.
The Boxer, The Philosopher and The Model
It sounds like the title of one of those jokes, but it is a story I picked up in Wikipedia.
Years ago, C used to know the late Dee Wells and her sister. Dee was a respected journalist and was married at the time to the rather famous philosopher Professor A. J. Ayer. I was browsing through his entry and found this story.
He taught or lectured several times in the United States, including serving as a visiting professor at Bard College in the fall of 1987. At a party that same year held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson who was forcing himself upon the (then) little-known model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer said: “Do you know who the fuck I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world,” to which Ayer replied: “And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men”. Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out.
Does this illustrate that words are stronger than fists?
The Zopa-Go-Round
The title of this post, nods a little towards Rossminster, which was credited with a rather dubious tax avoidance scheme, that was nicknamed the Money-Go-Round, by the press. The two companies Zopa and Rossminster operate in different fields and I suspect they have really nothing in common. But I like the title.
Now, why do I call it the Zopa-Go-Round?
Usually saving accounts fall into two broad categories.
- The account gives you instance access and an obscenely-low interest rate.
- Your money is locked in for a year or maybe longer, but you get a slightly better rate. But getting your money out early is not only extremely difficult, but it comes at the cost of various financial penalties.
Zopa is something different and very much between the two.
As 2011 has just finished, I now know that I earned just under six percent before tax over the year and that includes all bad debts and charges.
Not a bad rate considering that you have no restrictions on withdrawing money, if it is in your account. So if you have just been paid some interest or some capital has been returned, you can transfer it to your bank account without charge, if that is the place you need it. There is also no charge for putting more money in.
So one of the great things about a Zopa account is that it can be used like a higher interest deposit account without the restrictions and you can move you money in and out freely, as it suits you.
If you take my circumstances, it illustrates how a Zopa account can be used.
When I moved here, I was unable to sell my stud in Suffolk, so I am living on my savings in the Zopa account, plus a small drawdown from my pension. So each month, instead of re-investing all of the money that I earn from Zopa in new lending, I retrieve enough to pay my bills and expenses. If I have any surplus at the end of the month in my current account, I transfer this money back into Zopa.
In my case, much of the capital I have put in, is still lent out to borrowers, but is of course paying regular interest. I could if required sell some of these loans on, but as most are up-to-date, I prefer to keep the borrowers I know, rather than new ones I don’t.
So the money goes around and around and sometimes I choose that it comes out my way.
Hence Zopa-Go-Round!
You can think of many people, who might want this form of flexibility.
I don’t think that my situation is untypical, as often there comes a time in one’s life, where you downsize your house or your possessions.
C and I had always intended to sell up and move to London, although we’d never put a date on it. but we had window shopped for a house in Hampstead. Unfortunately, her premature death put an end to all those dreams. A lot of our possessions would probably have been sold and we wouldn’t have really needed to have three good cars and a horse box.
So just like many, on retirement, we would have a few thousand pounds to either spend or save. Hopefully, the sale of the stud, would have bought a desirable house, where we wanted it.
As I have found, Zopa has been an ideal place to put that money and draw it out as and when I need it.
Zopa though, isn’t the best place to put money, that you might need in a few months, unless you are prepared to use their system to sell good loans to other people. So it wouldn’t be the best place to save your money to pay the taxman, unless of course you save more than you need or do very detailed calculations.
One thing to remember is that if say you put £10,000 into Zopa and lend it for three years at an average rate of five percent, you’ll get just over £300 a month back. I’m assuming that you don’t adjust the interest rates you charge to get the best return and that you don’t reinvest the money returned.
Building The Revolution
I went to the Royal Academy to see the exhibition on Soviet Art and Architecture entitled Building the Revolution – Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935.
It was fascinating and sad in equal measure.
The former because some of the buildings were spectacular and ground-breaking. It was all rather sad to see the state of decay that some of them are now reduced to.
But then some of our best buildings from the era have suffered a similar fate. Although, it is from just after World War II, I once went over Cliff Key Power Station in Ipswich. That was a real pleasure and it was a pity that it couldn’t have been transformed for a modern purpose. But then those power stations, were built to last thirty years and often the foundations weren’t of the best. Just look at the state of the iconic Battersea Power Station today.
In the Courtyard of te Royal Academy, there was this tower.
It is a modern reconstruction of Tatlin’s Tower; a giant tower that was never built.
Life is too Short for Retirement
The statement is from Colin Murray Parkes, who has just received this year’s Times/Sternberg Active Life Award. This summary from Wikipedia sums up the sort of work he has done.
Parkes is a former chairman and now life president of the charity Cruse Bereavement Care.[4] He acted as a consultant and adviser following the disasters in Aberfan, the Cheddar/Axbridge air crash, the Bradford Football Club fire, the capsize of the Herald of Free Enterprise and Pan American aircraft explosion over Lockerbie. At the invitation of UNICEF, he acted as consultant in setting up the Trauma Recovery Programme in Rwanda in April 1995. At the invitation of the British government, he helped to set up a programme of support to assist families from the United Kingdom who were flown out following the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001, in New York. In April 2005 Parkes was sent by Help the Hospices with Ann Dent to India to assess the psychological needs of people bereaved by the tsunami.
And much of it was done after he was supposed to have retired.
One paragraph in the article in The Times today is particularly appropriate to my experience.
He has these words of advice: “The most important thing is not to avoid people who are bereaved. They won’t necessarily ask for help, but it is a lonely time. So do take the trouble to invite them out or go in for a visit. Even if all they really want to do is feel sad and have a good cry, it is nice to be able to do that with someone.
“Most people cope very well with bereavement if you give them a chance. Often people do the wrong thing for the right reason and avoid bereaved people because they are afraid of upsetting them, when actually they are upset anyway and sometimes long to talk about it. This is particularly the case at times of celebrations or anniversaries.”
He is so right. You can could the number of my friends, who have come to visit me since I moved on the fingers of one hand. But I did get large numbers of Christmas cards this year.
Am I bothered? Well, yes and no! I know that I’m way down some peoples’ lists and as someone who has always made most of his own entertainment, I can cope. But don’t say you’ll come and then don’t do it.
There’s Always Some Bad News at Christmas
This year it was the pointless but deadly bombings in Nigeria. It’s when things like this happen, how anybody with any knowledge of the world’s great religions could see them as anything other than unwarranted mass murder.
The Anonymous Widower 