Thirteen Years of Blogging: 2009 - 2022

The first post on this blog is dated 29th April 2009.

That's thirteen years. Which is pretty good going for a personal blog.

A while ago, one of my rare commenters remarked that this blog seemed to be mostly about me getting things off my chest.

Fair comment.

I think that's why I started doing it.

I'm certainly not in it for the money.

Every now and then I wonder about being more professional about the whole thing.

Being more professional would require that I choose a subject and offer a consistent view of the world around that subject.

I would have to produce content for the clicks.

I'd start caring about views and engagement.

I'd have to do SEO (which I think is voodoo anyway) and other such stuff.

The financial and personal reward for all that would be?

Zip. Nada.

Sounds like a decision to me.

Moody Soho Cafe Interior Photograph

 

It's been a long time since I took photographs from inside a cafe. It's taking a while to get back into using a proper camera and not being self-conscious about it. This was one afternoon in the Caffe Nero on Old Compton Street.

Decorating Project - How To Look Like A Pro

 Get yourself one of these...

As seen on You Tube decorator videos. The big semi-circle is for scraping paint from the roller back into the paint tub, but maybe my roller was too knackered to give up the paint when I used it. Sure took long enough to wash it out.

Decorating Project - Background

It's called `building', not `precision engineering'. A conventional two-storey brick-built house is basically four brick-and-mortar walls holding up two wood rafts. Those walls were laid by hand by men who knew what they were doing, and used a spirit level frequently, but we're not talking laser levels and automated mortar-laying. My house does not have one straight line or right-angle corner in it. The rafts are made of joists running from one side wall to the other, with planks of wood nailed to them to make floors, and boards nailed to the underside of the upper raft to make ceilings. Those planks were cut straight on a machine, but laid by eye. Gaps in the front and back walls were left that were roughly the size of the window frames ordered by the builder. Add in some more-or-less square stairs, a couple of internal walls, and there's a lot of gaps, slack and empty spaces in a perfectly sound and strong house.

All that coping, skirting boards, filling plaster and other such decorating-and-finishing is to fill up or hide the gaps, make everything look neat and tidy, as well as stopping small things from falling below the floors, or, for that matter, coming up from the earth under the ground floor.

The structural load is carried by the side walls (which are solid in a terrace) and the joists, with a bit done by the front and back walls.

None of the finishing work is structurally significant.

Now that may seem obvious when it's said, but I'm not a builder or a decorator, and I was never quite clear on whether (say) tearing out skirting board would result in the collapse of the wall.

Okay. Laugh. I deserve it. It's not what I trained to do. Nor my father before me, nor either of my grandfathers.

But I'm doing some of it now. And I need to understand this stuff or I don't feel comfortable.

Why do we get cracks in plaster and between finished work? Was it badly done?

Nope. It's because you don't want precision-joints.

Some of that slop between the parts has a useful purpose.

The ground your house is built on expands when there's rain or a lot of moisture in the air, and contracts when the sun stays out for long enough to heat the ground up. That means your house moves slightly. In different directions every year.

The same temperature changes that affect the ground, also affect the materials in your house. Everything moves slightly all the time.

You move the furniture around, and that changes the load on the joists and hence the supporting walls.

Have some vigorous, errrm, married life and the load shifts around on the joists supporting the bed, and that pushes at the ceiling boards in the room below.

That's where all those hairline and other cracks in the plaster come from. If everything fitted precisely, there would be more cracks, not less, since everything would be connected to everything else.

So hairline cracks are a consequence of the features, not a bug.

That's why it's okay to plaster a hairline crack over, and / or slap a good think coat of paint on it.

By `plaster' of course, I mean Polyfilla or decorators' caulk.

Other gaps need silicone, which everyone says has some bend and flex in it, so shouldn't crack. (Instead, somewhere near the silicone will crack instead.)

Large gaps and holes need filling with foam, and then a final coat of filler for the paint.

And no, the filler or the tape will not `resist' further cracking. Any force large enough to shift a chunk of wall, ceiling or floor a fraction of a millimetre is going to laugh at a bit of adhesive tape.

And the bit where I use tape or some careful work to get a good sharp square edge on the corners and edges?

Have you seen my house?

Feltham Circles, Graffiti Walls

 More from the Park Across The Main Road I Never Visited Until Now... I caught sight of some graffiti and thought I'd have a look. Probably a few tags on a wall, nothing more. According to MyLondon this is called the Feltham Circles, Pevensey Road Nature Reserve. They say

Amid the shrubbery and wildlife of this Feltham nature reserve are a collection of old circular sewage beds, which have been transformed into a striking graffiti gallery. Nestled among the giant, intricately sprayed tags adorning these crumbling concrete monuments are a collection of colourful characters, from a horned ogre to a stoned hand grenade. 

 

The Park Across The Main Road You Never Went To Before

This is a part of the park across the A312 from the Air Park. I've walked round the Air Park since I moved here back in (cough, splutter), but until recently I had never crossed the main road into this park. While walking round, I met a man walking with his two sons: he had never been into this park in the seven years he had been in the area. 

When I was ten, the roads were not as busy, and we cycled everywhere often on the same day, I'd have been round this park and the bit round the corner by the end of week two of moving in.

I'm not ten.

 

Matthew 7:1-5

I saw Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew recently, thanks to MUBI. Pasolini's Christ is not some wimpy angel of peace and love, but a hard-core revolutionary expecting to give up his life for the cause. Pasolini lets the original words do the talking, and maybe that's why the Vatican liked it: more or less all the key points from the Gospel in a movie.

At one point, Christ is handing out some random advice, including this...

1. Judge not, that ye be not judged. 2. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. 3. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? 4. Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? 5. Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Damn it's been a long time since I heard that sentiment. My generation grew up on this stuff. It sank into us, especially since it resembles the Commandment: Thou shalt keep thy nose out of business that is not thine, and having opinions, keep them to thyself lest other people think thou art a twat, and a busybody, and likely a grass, despised by all.

Look, of course we judge people. If we didn't, the same manipulative headcase could take us time and again. We need to learn who to avoid and why. But we also learn to say, with an utterly straight face: "just because you never pay your share of the bill and are always cadging rides but never paying for petrol, does not mean you are Bad Person". It just means we're having nothing more to do with you.

The point is that we don't judge publicly. Maybe privately, but that's always a risk.

Christ is telling us not to judge for fear of the consequences, and because we need a bit or work ourselves (the beam in our eye).

But there are other reasons not to judge publicly.

First, it keeps the air clearer.

Second, it lets the Bad People give themselves away, since they may not have the self-awareness to know that snarky tweets (for instance) are pretty much a turn-off.

Third, Bad People (as opposed to incompetent ones(*)) are not going to change because we say rude things about them.

If no-one tells the SJW that weird hair colours are a give-away, it's easier to spot SJW's.

The Twitters have never heard this stuff.

Two generations of people who never grew up hearing the basic wisdoms of the New Testament.

It's as good a way of understanding what we're seeing as anything else.

(*) We can correct people helpfully without making them feel bad, unless they really are horribly insecure, when nothing we say will be right, and silence is wiser.

Why The Cases Really Don't Matter

According to the ONS survey, one in thirteen people currently have the virus. A year ago that would have had us all locked into our houses. But everybody is chill, nobody is wearing masks and the trains are packed. Why so cavalier about the once all-important "case numbers"? (Aside from the fact that the money to support all that lockdown nonsense has run out.)

The answer is in this graph.

It's the graph of the ratio of deaths-with and deaths-from the Virus to the infections (lagged by four weeks o fit the 28-day rule). (Accepting the convention that with-Covid is as bad as from-Covid: with-deaths are about the same as from-deaths, but note that it is a 'medical' judgement whether a death is with- or from- or even if the Virus was involved at all.)

One week at the start, the Alpha strain killed about 1 in 45 of the people who got it. The rest had a really bad couple of weeks. Fatality fell off sharply towards summer 2020, as it does for respiratory diseases. The Delta variant hit in autumn 2020 and through winter 20/21, killing up to 1 in 125 of the people who got it at one point. Again, fatality fell off towards summer 2021. As we went into autumn / winter 2021, fatality did not increase significantly That was the vaccines.

Here's the next graph, of the prevalence of the Virus (again, I'm accepting the convention that positive tests are an accurate proxy for actual infections, which is not as obvious as you might think, as medical tests do not work the way you think they do).

Almost nobody had the Alpha variant in 2020, and more than 98% of those survived. Delta was known to be more infectious, and the autumn 2020 restrictions were looser than the four month lockdown that followed. The graph follows the usual respiratory curve in 2021, falling to a restriction-induced low in Spring, before increasing after so-called "Freedom Day". There it remains until Omicron appears and sends the numbers through the roof, especially in the Christmas and New Year weeks. January is now a socially quiet month, which brought the prevalence down, and then removing restrictions and the legal requirement to self-isolate allowed people to behave "normally", sending the prevalence up again. By then, between the vaccines and the relatively benign nature of Omicron, so-called "cases" ceased to matter.

10 Things I Can't Live Without

Here was a quick-and-easy post idea I couldn't resist. Search the title on You Tube and you will get a number of videos. Some are vaguely troubling. It turns out a lot of people can't live without pocket knives. Really?

Infrastructure stuff like Amazon, trains, electricity, gas, running water, not being mugged on the way to the station, my house, gas cookers, the Internet, dentists, doctors, friends and family, my glasses, and in my case, the entire Apple ecosystem... is all taken as read.

So here's the list...

Sony WF 1000XM-3 earphones. These are as good as everyone says

Music. From wake-up music to falling asleep music and every moment in between

De Longhi Dedica Espresso machine and Lavazza Red coffee. 'Nuff said

Exercise. Currently a Bosu ball and home weights

The Car. When you need a car, you need a car. Not a cab or a bus

Foyles and Fopp. There is no substitute for browsing for books, DVDs and CDs

To-Do List. Currently in a Moleskine notebook. I find To-Do lists have to be handwritten

A good Thai massage service, and osteopath. Because I have lousy posture and eventually that turns into aches.

Scarves and gloves in winter. Man do my hands get cold fast now.

The Freedom Pass. Age has its privileges and not having to worry about if you can afford to use public transport is one of them.

Oh how mundane! But then, I'm a Brit, so a Glock and a military-grade locking knife are illegal. I left out the wallet because this isn't an EDC list. Where's the Air Miles membership, because I'm always travelling? I'd love the exercise to be a fancy West End gym, but I can't afford those kind of prices. The local David Lloyd centre is pretty damn pricey as well.

Walking Through Hampstead Woods and Heath (Part 2)