Category: Home
You are viewing all posts from this category, beginning with the most recent.
Bolognese!
Last week, we had a new front door fitted.
That morning, I took it upon myself to prepare a bolognese before the doormen arrived so that we didn’t need to get in each other’s way, and so that we had something to eat for lunch for the next few days.
I make my bolognese in a 12" frying pan and cover it with a grease splatter fine mesh to let it cook slowly for a few hours. When the doormen arrived, that’s exactly what my bolognese was doing.
What I didn’t realise, until it was too late, is that the dust from their drilling and general doormen work was settling on the stove top in front of my bolognese on the back of the stove.
This was brought to my attention by my wife, who was already in a state of being very upset by the new door hanging to the right and not the left like her old door.
I inspected the bolognese and the splatter mesh cover carefully for signs of white paint dust similar the to very evident white paint dust sitting on top of the stove.
I honestly couldn’t see anything, although the bolognese did have quite a sheen (although this was after I’d just added some milk to it).
Anyway, my wife refused to eat it, so I had no choice, really, but to eat all of it over the next four days.
If anything, it tasted a bit spicier than normal, not in a bad way, and I have not grown any extra fingers, yet.
The Door
The door was old, but it still functioned as a door. It opened and closed, and kept us safe and warm.
As it got older, it got a bit cranky and quirky.
The spring-loaded closing mechanism no longer worked as it should. If you were a small person, a cat or a delivery driver, you had to beware this big old heavy door slamming shut whether you were in, out, or somewhere in between.
Sometimes the lock wouldn’t work at all and you had to hope there was someone inside who would let you in. Mostly, it required a certain knack to unlock it. Which kept kids out, and ensured extra exercise for grown-ups getting up off the sofa to let kids in.
One day, the housing association’s sub-contractors came to take our door away. It was a fire safety hazard, according to a very expensive risk assessment they carried out several years ago in the wake of the Grenfell Fire.
They came, they saw(ed), they removed our old door in five minutes flat, leaving a gaping hole.
The new door is sleek and fancy.
“It’s a like for like replacement,” they said.
“Hmmm… the handle is on the right hand side,” I said.
“And the door opens to the left not the right.”
“I’m very unhappy,” said my wife.
“It’s not magnetic,” said my nine year old.
“Where’s they keyhole?” my three year old didn’t say, but the question must surely have been going through his mind as he tried to unlock the door on the wrong (right) side with the new key.
Under poisoned skies
Watched Under Poisoned Skies on BBC iPlayer last night.
It’s the sad and shocking story of children in Iraq dying from leukaemia as a result of toxic air pollution from mega rich oil companies burning off excess natural gas in the open air near their homes.
Benzene (found in the air) and naphthalene (found in the children’s urine samples) are the main carcinogens.
Levels of benzene are between 3 and 9.6 Micrograms per cubic meter or “µg/m3”.
Levels of benzene by the so-called soil “hospital” at Southall Gasworks were between 4 and 12 Micrograms per cubic meter or “µg/m3”.
Southall residents to give blood samples
After six years of campaigning for justice:
“The fact that gas used to be manufactured from coal has been lost to the public consciousness, but the chemical legacy remains.”
“These communities already have multiple disadvantages with air pollution, overcrowding and poor housing. This is another burden being placed on them.”
Via: Scientists to examine health fears at west London luxury development
Finally got around to watching Our Friends In The North.
‘None of the issues the show mines so brilliantly – from inequality, deindustrialisation and the parlous state of Britain’s housing to homelessness and the corruption of our public officials – have gone away.’
The two wood-burning incinerators around the corner from our home appear to be no longer in use. One is is covered by corrugated sheets and scaffolding (prior to dismantling?), the other area is clean and relatively tidy.
Solidarity with all teachers today, especially those striking for better pay.
Eight year old is at home, and refusing to practice for his spelling test tomorrow because he doesn’t want to be a scab.
1,001 days since my little one made his debut.
The Property Lobby: The Hidden Reality Behind the Housing Crisis in Ealing
There will be 14,800 new homes in 23 new developments in Southall over the next few years. 14 units over 10 stories high, and 7 over 20 stories high. Up to 40,000 new residents (and their cars)!
One third of the total new developments in the whole of Ealing borough (only Acton is getting it worse).
So not happening so much in the ‘white’ or richer areas of the borough, for some reason.
None of these homes will be genuinely affordable to most people currently living in overcrowded homes in Southall or Ealing, as Studio bedsit flats start at around £300,000!
Most will stay empty until they are sold to investors from China, Malaysia, Singapore, Bahrain(!) where they are actively marketed by the greedy property developers.
The same property developers who gave former Ealing Council ‘Leader’ Julian Bell and new Ealing Council ‘Leader’ Peter Mason (also a Southall Green ward councillor) over £30,000 in recent years to holiday in the south of France at the MIPIM property festival in Cannes described as a “booze ’n’ hookerfest” by Private Eye Magazine.
Bell says, “it didn’t cost the taxpayer a penny”, but in Southall we are already paying with our health and quality of life thanks to the poisonous air from the development of the contaminated old gasworks site (due to complete in 2038!).
Town planner Mason says it was a mistake, and not what he expected(!).
Where will 40,000 new residents’ children go to school (and how will they get there and back), how will they get an appointment to see a GP, which hospital will they go to when they need emergency treatment, and how will they get there on the roads already regularly gridlocked by too much traffic?
Worth taking the time to have a look at stopthetowers.info/other-cam…
Cllr Mason recommended we read Bob Colenutt’s ‘The Property Lobby: The Hidden Reality Behind the Housing Crisis’.
So I did.
What Colenutt says (and he has a wealth of experience in local authority housing and planning, and in the community resisting property developers), is that developers do have too much power (as Mason argues), but also that local councils and councillors do not do enough to resist, do not have the negotiating skills (contrary to how Mason originally described the importance of trips to MIPIM to ’negotiate hard’), and too readily embrace the ‘financialisation’ of the land and property market brought about by David Cameron’s and Nick Clegg’s ConDem government in 2010.
So now, we have a very real housing crisis fuelling the huge profits of private developers, all facilitated and egged on by mostly Labour councils too easily rolling over and allowing them to build fewer and fewer ‘genuinely affordable homes’ (because “where’s the profit in that?”).
What Colenutt says loudly and clearly is that without ordinary people’s and communities’ resistance it would be so much worse, and that to all intents and purposes councils and councillors are in bed with the developers.
Non-fiction: The Property Lobby: The Hidden Reality behind the Housing Crisis by Bob Colenutt 📚