In-sourcing as a way of life...

In my formative years, firstly as an apprentice and then a junior engineer in a large engineering company in the late 1970s and early 80s, I did the usual things like regularly drinking to excess and wasting money on useless expensive toys, but in those days I wasn't earning too much and so looking back I can see my wages were heavily supplemented simply by doing things myself.

Many's the hour I would spend under the car bonnet (that is, the 'hood' to those across the pond), or stripping motorbike engines or doing DIY improvements to the first house I bought.   Also, Saturday mornings spent in the local scrapyard climbing on piles of old cars stacked four high, with tools between my teeth and also hanging out of every available pocket, just to get at that elusive water pump or starter motor I needed.  Funny how the models I was after always seemed to be at the top of the pile, but that's life... 

For younger readers, this is how second-hand car parts were to be had in the good old days, long before the breakers started stripping parts themselves and offering them off-the-shelf, at hugely inflated prices of course because they now have to factor in their own labour costs.

I think the now all-pervasive 'Health & Safety' culture must share some of the blame, although it's also fair to say that these old scrapyards were potentially dangerous places to be if you didn't have your wits about you. 

The cost of minority trying to move to mainstream.....

When Countryfile was considered a 'minority' programme and tucked well away out of sight on BBC2 on Sunday evenings, it was actually quite worth watching.

But the mandarins at the BBC decided that this programme was attracting a sufficiently large audience to be transferred to what they erroneously perceive as being their primary channel, BBC1.

However, being overpaid and over-pensioned public television 'executives', they failed to spot the obvious in that those people who watch Countryfile are not necessarily the same as watch Eastenders, The Apprentice or Strictly Come Dancing, just a few examples of how the BBC abuses its legally-enforceable compulsory taxation status and therefore wastes shitloads of its too-easily obtained and ill-gotten gains on these and other equally crap populist programmes.  

I'm not totally knocking this type of stuff (well, I am !), if that's what you're into, but they could all easily find a home on commercial television channels, where success or failure would rest or fall on their ability to attract private subscriptions or advertising revenues.  However, there's no justification for a body funded solely by legalised theft to be seen as trying to compete with the professionals in that particular game.

In the process of moving Countryfile to BBC1, they sacked practically everyone of adult age who was remotely connected with the original, and popular, version of the programme, which apparently has subsequently been the subject of several lawsuits over alleged 'ageism'.  

I say sacked all, but they hung onto good old John Craven, best known for trying to present news programmes to seven-year olds in the 1970s and 80s.  That says it all.....

The current crop of presenters, all probably from the home counties* and regularly clad in designer gillets and woolly bobble-hats, presumably because they've never been outdoors in what the rest of the country perceives as being cold or even a little cool, are a complete disaster.

To add insult to injury, they screen Countryfile at 7.30 to 8.00 pm in the summer and autumn months, when anyone with an ounce of sense would know that a large portion of their likely target audience, i.e. those who actually work the land, are still outside during the light evenings, tending their livestock and harvesting produce etc.

It's time to end this state-sponsored TV licensing fiasco, and the sooner the better....


* I can detect a slight Geordie accent from one of them, but he's obviously from the richer parts of Newcastle or the surrounding towns and villages.  Still, one presumes he must have been outside in cold weather before...

The Great 2014 Kew Gardens 50p Rush.....

Must be a very slow news day today....

A couple of the mainstream media sites are running a story about a limited-edition fifty-pence piece from 2009 commemorating Kew Gardens that might be worth a good few quid to collectors.

So, it was time for exploratory abdominal surgery on poor old Perky, and to take a good look around inside her - just in case...

Unfortunately, despite retrieving exactly seventy of the little blighters, not a Kew Gardens type in sight.  There's 58 of the usual Britannia, 6 more which I think might simply be Welsh, and only 6 commemorative types, two of which are the same.  Click on the photo for a larger image if you're even remotely interested.

Five of these commemoratives are only a few years old, but there's one there from 2000 with the legend '...Public Libraries...' if anyone wants to make me an offer....

And don't worry, Perky is fine !

A good big'un beats a good little'un ... Growing Big Vegetables in 2014

We've decided this year to try to grow larger varieties of a few vegetables :-

• Onions - Kelsae
• Leeks - Exhibition Pot Leeks
• Tomatoes - Beefeater
• Carrots - Sweet Candle

In mid January, we sowed 120 onion seeds and 60 leeks.  We started them off indoors in covered cells.  By indoors, I mean on the various south-facing window cills in the house, particularly the kitchen window which is 2.4 m (8') long.

To give us even more growing space within this large window, I've built a rough-and-ready free-standing shelf from white MDF furniture boards, and this now sits on the cill.   It's very much a temporary addition, for the winter months only, and it'll be dismantled and removed to the shed as soon as we can get the plants out into the greenhouse when it warms up a little outside.

six seed trays in the kitchen window...

Living on £10k pa in the UK ?

I spotted this posting on the Firestarter's blog, one of the many fine FI blogs I visit occasionally....

http://thefirestarter.co.uk/is-it-possible-to-live-on-10000-a-year-in-the-uk/

.... and so I thought I'd carry out a similar exercise myself.  Click on the Table for an enlarged view. 

Long live the North-South divide.....

I stumbled across a TV show tonight, which was called '...Location, Location, Location...'.

I watched almost disbelievingly as the presenters tried to convince a pair of hapless buyers that a flat for £600,000 in a post-modern Stalinist block in Holloway, North London, was actually a good buy.... I'll spell it out - six hundred thousand pounds for a god-awful two-and-a half bedroom flat, FFS !

And believe me, I know all about Stalinist flats, having lived in several during my times working throughout Russia.

Here '...up north...', we own a three-bedroomed house on a 600 square-metre plot, with only three near neighbours, open southern and western farmland aspects and a protected woodland to the north, for which we paid around a quarter of that sum, including the recent garden extension purchase.

And lest you think we're severely disadvantaged and remote from any trappings of so-called civilisation, within a mile or so from us we have a 24-hour Tesco Extra, an ALDI, a Boots, several health centres and dental practices, plus an array of small & specialist high-street shops and banks.  Within five miles in another direction, we have another 24-hour Tesco Extra, a Sainsburys Superstore, a Morrisons Superstore, another ALDI, a Lidl and an M&S Food store, and a small town centre hosting many of the national high street favourites.

I'm a 20-minute taxi ride and then a two-and-half-hour train journey away from central London (or around four to five hours by car), for the very occasional visits I need to make to the Metropolis.  I'm half-an-hour from an airport from which I can reach, via empty roads and a short hop to Amsterdam Schiphol, just about any major city in the world.

And before anyone tries to justify the ridiculous London house prices by talking of the higher wages available, I know I'm not alone in the North in being able to charge my clients London rates for the services I provide, without all the cost disadvantages of having to live there.  I can also say that in the past I've turned down six-figure offers of full-time employment in London. 

I've got no beef at all against the very fine people of London, many of my friends live in the wealthier suburbs and I also worked there myself many moons ago, for several years via the weekly-commute routine.  

However, to paraphrase an old Victoria Wood comedy sketch, "...I'd like to apologise to those readers living in the South - it must be terrible for you..."

Weed Control for our New Hedgerow....

Our new hedgerow has been in the ground for almost exactly one year now, but it seems that one particular area has grown noticeably better than the others.  This is where we created our  'cherry-tree island' by putting down a weed control membrane and then covering with plum-coloured shale.  The new growth on this three-or-four metre stretch outperformed the rest of the hedge last year by a wide margin.

We're assuming the better growth in this area was because these hedge plants didn't have to compete with weeds and grass for nutrients in the soil throughout the growing season, and so we've decided to put down a weed membrane along the whole length of the hedge.   Now is an ideal time with everything dormant in the garden.  We want more cover from the hedge this year to screen off the new garden - overall, last year's growth was quite disappointing despite the decent weather we had in the summer.