grumpyf1

"£4billion for cash, mate?" I had a plasterer and electrician round this week. The work they did cost me getting on for £570. Add another seven zeroes to that, and you’ll reach 5.7billion quid – the possible cost of repairing the crumbling Houses of Parliament. The nursery rhyme got it wrong – it’s not London Bridge that’s falling down, it’s London’s parliamentary home. After 150 years of literally plastering over the cracks and carrying out running repairs, the Grade 1 listed building is at risk of sinking, falling to bits, catching fire or an exciting combination of all three at the same time, thanks to outdated cabling, a sewage system straight out of an engineering museum, and an extra large helping of chronic indecision. Despite a report five years ago warning that damage may be major and irreversible, MPs are still having a good old think about it, and unlikely to come up with an answer for another year and a half. Politicians putting off a decision that mig...

Lovely day in Cumbria... To make optimal use of the word ‘understatement’ - it’s been an interesting couple of weeks weather-wise, hasn’t it? Last week featured rain that would have seen Noah reaching for his saw and nails, whilst glancing nervously at the sky and wondering what the giraffes were up to. Where I work, on the edge of Ambleside, the river Brathay filled up rapidly enough that it was actually higher than the road. Unfortunately, this being Cumbria, it was being held back by a dry stone wall, so the river was squirting out through the gaps between the stones and filling up the road. True, it wasn’t all bad. Someone in a ’17-plate Mercedes obviously presumed their car must be amphibious, and had attempted to drive through the deepening flood. When you pay that much for a car, I guess you just expect it to come with an automatic ‘boat’ mode. Still, I’m sure their carpets will dry out eventually. And their shoes and trousers. My journey home (as I’m sure many of your...

Back when it began: Untidy, excessive undergrowth and in bad shape -and the allotment was pretty bad too. The dream is over. This week we relinquished tenancy of our allotment plot. Nearly eight years have passed since we took it on. Back then, the decade had only just started, bank notes were made of paper and I didn’t need a hat on a sunny day quite as much as I do nowadays. We were thrilled to bag our large plot. OK, it was waist-deep in weeds, but we had high hopes, untapped energy and boundless optimism. We would turn this patch of green stuff into a fruit and veg-based paradise. It would become an oasis of tranquil productivity. A sanctuary of bountiful (and edible) goodness. My first ever encounter with a slow worm, whist hacking at the undergrowth with shears, did involve me believing I’d stumbled upon a highly venomous snake (the screaming and running away wasn’t my finest moment). A little research revealed my wriggly chum was, in fact, a kind of leg-free lizard and...

Last year was rightly heralded as being a bad one for the music world, with numerous stars leaving us too soon. The chameleonic-genius that was David Bowie. The hugely talented, diminutive, star with just the one name – Prince. 80s pop-God with the amazing vocal range, George Michael. Each were individuals I admired and appreciated for their raw talent, their influence on others, and their contributions to my listening pleasure through the 1970s, ‘80s, and beyond. But the news this week that American rocker Tom Petty had died, as the age of 66, hit me harder than Bowie, Prince or Michael, or any of the other talented musicians and singers we’ve lost in recent times. Unless you count briefly landing there on the way to a holiday in Mexico, I’ve never been to the USA. I’m not specifically a fan of American music, but something about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ songs struck a chord with me. At a point in my life when I couldn’t have been more into music unless I lived ins...

Today’s newspapers are tomorrow’s chip paper. Wholly unhygienic, obviously, but you definitely can’t eat your greasy fried spuds off a website. The problem is, the printed paper used to be a main source of news. Now, with the instant convenience of the internet and 24-hour rolling reports, the poor old printed format often seems hopelessly out of date by the time you unfold it. Significantly, even if you’re willing to accept a notable time-delay by modern standards, why would you want to pay for something you can get free on the world wide web? For national papers, the draw of expert journalism, in-depth analysis and insight can still win over readers who yearn for more than the instant short-form gratification of website articles. For local papers, it’s that local – even hyper-local – news, which the regional sections of larger news organisations simply can’t keep up with. This isn’t about what’s happening in your ‘region’, it might not even be enough that it’s about your to...