My Chairs Now Have A Padded Seat
I was in IKEA yesterday and saw some strap-on chair cushions. So I bought two for my new stacking chairs!
They fit well despite the fact they cost a lot less than the chairs. It goes to show, you don’t have to always spend a fortune to get what you want!
When the living room is finished, I might change them to match the carpet! But knowing my love of simple design, I suspect that might never happen.
I’ve Now Got A Back Garden
The back garden is now finished.
I like it a lot, despite the fact, all I did was provide coffee and tea for the good people from Cercis.
My Non-Existent Trickle Vents
All windows in a house are supposed to have trickle vents. My windows don’t! Wikipedia says this about the effect of trickle vents on the indoor environment.
Trickle vents will help avoid problems associated with poor ventilation in naturally ventilated spaces, including, reduced risk of condensation, avoided over ventilation (minimizing energy consumption), improved comfort through draft avoidance.
So I’ve now opened the top windows to see if this makes the house healthier for me.
My Non-Existent Trickle Vents
it looks like I could have just scored another victory over the dreaded Jerry
My New Stacking Chairs
My old dining chairs have had it and one has even collapsed. So I ordered two Castor stacking chairs from twentytwentyone.
As you can see I brought the two of them back on a number 30 bus.
The weirdest thing is that the size of the seat on the chairs and my old stools is virtually exactly the same. The new chairs are 36 cm. and the stools are 35.6 cm. It actually looks like the old stools, which were made in the 1970s are probably fourteen inches. They are also the same height, as you can see in the picture, which shows the end of my table.
Do We Put Our Heating On At The Right Time?
I have been puzzled, why after C died, I started to develop hay fever like symptoms. I blogged about it first here in April 2010, which was before I had the serious stroke.
I have just read this thoughtful article on the BBC entitled “Is It Too Early To Put The Central Heating On?”.
i asked someone who knew us well, and they said that the house was always very cold.
Now both C and myself, were brought up in cold houses, with perhaps hers a little bit warmer than mine because she was down in the valley at East Barnet and I was on top of the hill at Cockfosters.
When I met her, she had the worst chilblains I’ve ever seen. They disappeared fairly soon afterwards and she always put it down to wearing Scholl sandals. She incidentally wore those virtually until the day she died. I suspect there was not one day in the forty years we were together she didn’t put a pair on. She even drove in them. She always said, I should, as they would keep my feet warm.
But could the death of her chilblains be put down to her not living in her parents’ house any more? She was in a warm Hall of Residence in Liverpool and afterwards we lived generally in warmer housing, until we moved to Suffolk.
My house as a child was very cold and I was always having time off with a hat fever like runny nose. In fact one of my memories is my mother boiling up handkerchiefs on the gas stove for my father and I. He suffered terrible catarrh and was always sucking on dreadful menthol sweets. I remember, he used to keep his garage very warm and I would often go there to talk to him and listen to football on the Light Programme. Did I go because it was warm?
But everything changed when my grandmother died, as my parents could now afford more electric fires and perhaps more importantly, I got the big sunny bedroom at the back of the house. I was also about twelve and could spend more time in the fresh air, when it wasn’t cold.
Over the years in Suffolk, C and I developed our own ways of living with cold weather.
She always wrapped up well, did a lot of exercise and I usually had a fan heater playing on my feet.
I did keep my car hotter than she did. I seem to remember, she adjusted her Porsche to 22.5°C. I liked it warmer.
I can also remember staying in hotels in London several times when C complained very much about the high temperature.
When she died in 2007, I did a lot of things to warm the house up, like putting in extra radiators and buying the thickest duvet I could find. I have since bought a thinner one.
It does seem strange that my rhinitis started about that time.
So it does seem that temperature and humidity, has a lot of effect on my rhinitis.
One thing I’m going to do, is make sure my heating and ventilation is completely and precisely controllable.
It’s All Dropping Into Place
If I look at my father, he had breathing problems and I suspect so did his father as he suffered from asthma and died of pneumonia and other complications in his forties. Both were pretty heavy smokers and my grandfather was a heavy drinker too. My father used to tell stories of picking his father up late at night from various clubs in a very bad state and that’s probably why my father was a sensible drinker and why he brought me up to be the same. I never for instance ever saw my father drunk. My father’s only addiction other than his pipe, was industrial strength menthol catarrh tablets, which he consumed virtually all day, to try to get his throat clear.
As a child, I suffered similarly with my breathing and throat at times, but then we lived in a cold house, heated by electric fires, which must have made the air exceptionally dry. From about the age of eight, I had a south-facing room with big picture windows, which was very warm at times. I regularly, lost a term, usually the spring one, in my schooling. My doctor had no idea, about what was the problem, so they took my tonsils out, which was an all-purpose remedy in those days.
Things improved when I got to about twelve or so, and my parents just felt, I’d grown out of it. It could be that we were spending increasing time at Felixstowe, where my parents had bought a house to retire to, or it could be that I spent more and more time at my father’s print works in Wood Green. Who knows why? I don’t even have any medical records from that period, as my medical records restarted some time about 1969. So you can see why I’m all in favour of computerised medical records, which the patient can access when and where they want through the Internet!
I can remember my late teens very well and can’t ever remember going to the doctor or feeling unwell, especially at University in Liverpool, whilst working at Enfield Rolling Mills or in The Merryhills, or generally riding about on my bicycle.
I certainly didn’t feel ill, either in the early years of my marriage to C, either in Liverpool or in Melbourn near Cambridge. The first entry on my medical record, is a visit to the doctor in Melbourn about excessive diarrhoea, which looks like a classic glutening.
However things got a lot worse, when we moved to Shannon Place in St. John’s Wood. The flat was damp and cold and I can remember going to the doctor with lots of knee and arm pains. He recommended knee surgery, which I didn’t accept.
But then when we moved to the eleventh floor in Cromwell Tower, everything got better and in the three or four years we lived there, I never saw the doctor on my own behalf. But the flat was comfortably warm and the air was very fresh.
We then lived in Suffolk for forty years and only at odd occasions did my breathing problems come back.
That is until Celia died and I think in certain ways I reverted to my childhood habits; like wrapping myself in the bedclothes, keeping the house as warm as I could and avoiding going out. I started getting what looked like hay fever soon after C died in 2007.
Since my stroke and also since moving to London it has got a lot worse, but I’m now in a particularly airless house with little ventilation.
It might need to have heat recovery ventilation. Wikipedia says these are the benefits.
As building efficiency is improved with insulation and weather stripping, buildings are intentionally made more airtight, and consequently less well ventilated. Since all buildings require a source of fresh air, the need for HRVs has become obvious. While opening a window does provide ventilation, the building’s heat and humidity will then be lost in the winter and gained in the summer, both of which are undesirable for the indoor climate and for energy efficiency, since the building’s HVAC systems must compensate. HRV introduces fresh air to a building and improves climate control, whilst promoting efficient energy use.
Certainly, a proper system will be better than I’ve got now.
My Shower Room Was Designed By An Idiot
If I’m being charitable, to call Jerry an idiot is probably best, but sometimes I feel he was almost a sadist.
I said how if you have a shower, a lot of the water outside the shower area, gets thoroughly wet and if you use the toilet in the morning, you need to put shoes on, as if you’re in socks, they just soak up the water.
But the shower isn’t fit for purpose. I find it impossible to stand in the shower and wash underneath my arms unless I use a flannel, which I don’t have to do in all of the other showers I’ve used over the last few years. And guess what? There’s no place to put a flannel, so it inevitably falls on the floor. I don’t have trouble picking it up, but the tiles he used are very slippery when wet and one day, they’ll claim a victim. I just hope it’s not me.
The shower too, doesn’t know how to mix the water, so depending on where you stand, you either get hot or cold water, but rarely something in between.
The sooner the builders finish the bathroom downstairs the better. As then they can fix the two shower rooms.
I’m looking forward to 2015!
Things I Really Want For My Birthday
Today is my birthday and a few years ago, I didn’t think I’d make the next one, let alone the fourth after my stroke.
I’m happy living here in leafy Dalston at the eastern edge of Hackney, but there are a few things, I want for my birthday.
The first is that, I’d love to get my breathing back to the level it was when I lived with C. All I’ve got is a permanently runny nose, just like I had as a child. Perhaps, it’s just London, although it really started after C died and got a lot worse when I had the stroke. If I look back on the last few years, there are times, when it goes, but why does it go. Two doctors have said it’s hay fever, but then another has said, I’ve no allergy except gluten. Certainly, the sea seems to make it better. So perhaps, I need to find an attractive widow, who lives by the coast in say Liverpool or Brighton.
I’d also like my bathroom finished, as it’s been a long time since the first builders started and then effectively gave up or went bust. The job started with the removal of the old bathroom in October last year.
I’d also like some stacking chairs for my living room to go with my table.
At least I’m getting one thing, I really really want and that is having supper in Arbutus.
But I suppose the best birthday present is outside my control. I did think about going to see the World Athletics Championships in Moscow this week. I didn’t, but I didn’t know that Mo Farah would be running in the final tonight. If I had, it might have swayed me.
But knowing my luck, he won’t win tonight! If it had been tomorrow, he’d have walked it.
I Hate Avoidable Imperfections
I have just spent twenty minutes putting out the recycling. As it was only two full green sacks of mixed recycling and a cardboard box, that is far too long.
The problem isn’t the sacks, the box, my gammy hand or anything else outside of my control, but the front door of my house. I asked my previous builder to do something with it, so that it doesn’t close on its own volition. Luckily, it has only managed to lock me out once, but tonight it closed on me four times, as I took the recycling out. But I always check that my keys are in my pocket, as they were tonight.
I’ve been in this house nearly three years and I’m getting fed up with this door. All it needs is to look good, have an adequate letter box to replace the one, the previous builders broke, only shut when I want it to, and possibly be able to be locked and unlocked from upstairs, by flicking a switch.
I have an adequate budget for this job and I don’t think it’s too much to hope that this door will be sorted soon.
I suppose the real problem is that Jerry got the door on the cheap!
The Anonymous Widower 