Tag Archives: http://www.bbc.co.uk

Wednesday 16th December 2009 – The Stairway to Heaven …

stairway to heaven stairs to attic first floor les guis virlet pionsat puy de dome france… now has five steps in it! I started this morning to fit the second upright and much to my surprise and amazement it was in in about 15 minutes. It didn’t need much shaping at all.

That made me feel so much better than I was yesterday – even more so after I’d fitted the rails for the two extra steps, and once the treads were in then it was better still.

I’ve made a start on fitting one of the uprights for the final row – the one where the turn will be in the staircase – but once again I ran out of light. If I hadn’t missed my aim when employing Ashley (my rather large wooden mallet) to fasten one of the beams and I’d have hit the beam that I was aiming for, I might have had some electric light. Guaranteed for 40,000 hours, these LED lightbulbs, but I’m sure the guarantee must exclude being wallopped to smithereens by a wooden mallet.

And I suppose that had I heard the alarm at 08:00 this morning instead of sleeping through until 10:00 I might have fitted the new uprights long before it went dark.

Mind you, a strange thing happened today. Round about 13:30 this weird golden object appeared in the sky. It only stayed around for about 15 minutes and then it started snowing again. I wonder what it was. I have vague memories of seeing something similar but it was so long ago that I can’t remember what it was.

In other news, have you seen the latest headlines? NATO has gone cap-in-hand to the Russkies to beg them to lend some helicopters to use in Afghanistan to crush the Taliban.

Of course, back in the old days those of you with long memories will recall that NATO armed the Mujahadeen (which was what the Taliban was called in those days) to attack the Russians and drive them out of Afghanistan after the Russkies had invaded that country. And now NATO, having invaded Afghanistan in its turn, is begging the Russkies to come and help them fight against the Mujahadeen (or Taliban) that is armed with the weapons that NATO gave them all those years ago.

NATO’s humiliation must now be complete. Are there any further depths that the west can plumb in this disgraceful and obscene invasion?

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Tuesday 8th December 2009 – I’ve put all four verticals …

bedroom stud wall upright living room les guis virlet puy de dome france… for the head of the stairs now, as you can see.

I’ve also taken out one of the original uprights so that the doorway upstairs is now totally resting on my two uprights.

You can see to the right of the photo a roll of this space-age insulation stuff. Tomorrow’s task is to line the stairwell with that stuff so that I can complete the head of the stairs on both levels.

I had a strange phone call today.
“Congratulations, Mr Hall. You have won a major prize.”
“Very good. You have my address. Post it to me”.
“Well, actually, you have to come to our meeting at Evaux to collect it”
“Not at all – you have my address. Just post it to me. I don’t understand why you are waiting.”
“We have to verify that you are retired and in receipt of a pension. That is your case, isn’t it?”
“That’s a bit forward of you. You don’t ask questions like that to someone you hardly know. When we’ve met each other a few times and we are about to get engaged then you can ask me these questions”
I can keep that up all night – but it’s sad, isn’t it? I actually look forward to the junk phone calls just so I can have someone to talk to.

In other news, 2 items have caught my eye today.

Firstly, Al-Qaida is being blamed for a bomb attack in Baghdad. That’s extremely exciting, for when Saddam Hussein was in power he refused to tolerate Al-Qaida and had expelled from Iraq anyone offering them any kind of support. It seems that the Anglo-American aggressor/invader/oppressor has allowed them back into the country.

The second bit of news is that the country that has supplied the most refugees to the EU is … err …. Iraq. 22% of all refugees in the EU last year were Iraqis. Now unless I have missed something obvious, I understood that one of the reasons for the Anglo-American aggressor/invader/oppressor invading Iraq was to promote a regime change to get rid of a tyrant/oppressor so that all of the Iraqis could live in peace and security. So now that Saddam has been gone for a few years and we have a western-style democracy, why is everyone fleeing the country? Shouldn’t they all be happy now with their Saddam-less democracy? Or is this something else that the Anglo-American aggressor/invader/oppressor has totally ballsed up?

And in other other news, I also keep statistics on visits to my website and yesterday I had over 100 more visitors that the usual daily average. I’ll have to wait til later to see what page it was that they were all visiting but it’s certainly exciting all of this.

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Friday 4th December 2009 – If you look closely at this pic …

bedroom stud wall les guis virlet puy de dome france…you will see not only the wall painted white (that I did last night) but a new vertical that I’ve fitted – where I’ve uprooted some of the floor.

Well, it isn’t exactly fitted but merely stuck in position for now.

This morning I did some tidying up and so on and had a look at the batteries in the barn. One of them is going a bit duff and although I haven’t identified which one it is yet, I’ve identified the bank that it’s in and isolated that.

I’ve also been playing “hunt the tools” and collected up a few that were hanging around.

Claude came for a chat too and was here for about an hour. As you know, he had his open heart surgery back in the summer and since then he’s been told that he needs to walk 4 miles each day. For the last couple of days he’s been in hospital having a check-up so I asked him if that was his 5000 mile service.

This afternoon I cut the lets into the new beam and then had a look at where I’ll be putting the bedroom wall. That’s important as the lower half of the “U” shape of the stairs to the attic will be fastened to the verticals that will support the new bedroom wall. So I measured up where the central pillar will be – the one that the bedroom and bathroom doors will pivot around, and that’s the one that you can see in the image. The bathroom door will be between the two new verticals and the bedroom door will be to the left of the newest vertical.

In other news, I wanted to mention something about catchy soundbites and cliches. They are quite good when used in unexpected and novel ways but quite often they become hackneyed and banal. In other cases they are used totally out of place and when they do, they become ridiculous. Just like the one used yesterday by Baroness Ashton, the EU’s new Foreign Affairs spokesman (that’s all she is – a spokesman. She won’t have any influence at all on policy).

There was a kamikaze attack on a gathering of students in Somalia and she described it as “a cowardly attack against civilians“. Now I don’t know about anyone else reading this blog, but I wouldn’t call a kamikaze attack “cowardly”. I certainly haven’t the courage to do it, and I doubt if Baroness Ashton has either. If she would volunteer to undertake one I would gladly withdraw my accusation, but in the absence of such an announcement, the only word that I can use to describe her statement is “pathetic”. If this is the best spokesman that the EU can come up with and if this is the finest example of her speeches, then I cringe for the future of the EU. How can anyone take seriously an organisation that employs someone to make such stupid statements?

I suppose she thinks that it’s really brave of someone to sit in a bunker 5000 miles away from the action and presses a button to launch a rocket that kills civilians, or flies at an altitude of 50,000 feet and presses a button that drops a bomb that kills civilians?

But on this subject I want to draw your attention to a paragraph from a book that I have recently been reading. It concerns a man who undertook to wear a greatcoat loaded with explosives and detonate it – and himself – in the middle of a meeting. The author describes him as a man of “high courage and self sacrifice”. Definitely not cowardly at all.

So who was the author and what was the book? Well, the author was, would you believe, a westerner. Now isn’t that a surprise? He is Anthony Cave Brown, a journalist and historian. And in his book Bodyguard of Lies he is actually describing an attempted suicide attack on Hitler.

So there you have it – a westerner attempting to kill someone we don’t like – “high courage and self-sacrifice” but someone with a brown skin killing people about whom we neither know nor care – “cowardly”

I don’t know if you remember the episode “General Hospital” in Blackadder Goes Forth when General Melchett talks about the leak of information from the hospital
“One of our spies (brave heroic fellow!) says that one of their spies (filthy rotten bounder!) ….“
and we all laughed at that because it was funny. But here we are 20 years later and it’s all becoming true to life. As I have said before and I’ll probably say again, the blatant hypocrisy of the western world is totally staggering. No wonder no-one in the vast majority of the world (the 80-odd percent who aren’t westerners) can’t take seriously anything that we do and doesn’t believe a word that we say.

And for Baroness Ashton as EU Foreign Affairs spokesman opening her account by saying something so stupid and ridiculous, and also so hypocritical, I really do despair for the future of the west. We don’t stand a chance.

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Monday 30th November 2009 – And even more Fiat Lux

12 volt led light bulb bedrool first floor stairs les guis virlet puy de dome franceYes, we now have lights on the first floor of the house. 2 x 1.2watt LEDs that illluminate the stairwell so that I can work in the dark.

And it works too – there I was, slogging away quite happily this evening until I suddenly noticed that it was 18:30., half an hour after knocking-off time.

Now that’s what I call “enthusiasm”, don’t you think?

no stairs removed les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut even with the lighting in the stairwell you can’t see the stairs. For the simple reason that they are no longer there. First job this morning was to take them out.

The treads and risers are pretty naff but the sides are fine and I’m planning to reuse those, although not to the same width. The risers are 17mm and the treads are 21mm, which means that for every 1m of height you need 1.26m of footprint. But what I’m planning to do is to invert the sides so that I have treads of 17mm and risers of 21mm, meaning that for every 1m of height I need 85mm of footprint. It’ll make the treads quite narrow but I can put a 3mm overhang to make 20mm and in any case it’s not as if the attic will be in daily use once I’ve completed the rest of the house.

But I’m going to have to get a move on and do the stairs, otherwise I shall have to take further steps to get into my room.

This afternoon I rewired the temporary wiring – it needed to be moved to another location now that I’ve removed the stairs. I can’t fit it permanently until I’ve done all of the room dividers on the first floor so it’ll be staying like this for a while. And that was when I put in the lights.

Tomorrow I’ll be putting in one of the beams (would you believe that I can only find one of the two that I bought?) and then fitting the uprights.

In other news, the trial of John Demjaniuk has made a start. And isn’t it a total farce? They’ve been hawking him around the world trying to find a crime to pin on him. He’s a Ukranian national and is alleged to have committed a crime in Poland. So how come the Germans are trying him? What is the claim to jurisdiction?

And the evidence is based on the testimony of “a now-dead Ukrainian”. This is going to be an exciting cross-examination as defence counsel and Demjaniuk all sit round a table, hold hands and try to get a glass to move around.

Not one single inmate of the camp is going to give evidence against him – all of the evidence is “circumstantial”. And what help has Demjaniuk been given to trace witnesses from 65 years ago to help his defence? And if they are all dead, will the prosecuting counsel and the plaintiffs all join hands around the table to try and contact them?

It’s a total embarrassment, this trial. Absolutely shameful. I don’t know how anyone in their right mind can drag such a case into court. It’s a desperate attempt to lynch a dying man who has already been found “not guilty” of one bunch of war crimes – and by the Zionists too! And they don’t give up lightly. Ask Adolf Eichmann (just get your family together, join hands around a table etc).

There ought to be an international outcry about bringing to a Court of Law a desperate case such as this. It reminds me of a western, the name of which I forget, that I once saw.
“We’ll make sure that we give the prisoner a fair trial. And then we’ll hang him from that tree over there“.

There are times when I’m ashamed to be a human being.

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Wednesday 25th November 2009 – Now you see it …

bedroom wall les guis virlet france… now you don’t. That could either refer to all of the mess in what will eventually be the bedroom, which has all been swept up and bagged for binning, or the wall between the stairway and the bedroom, half of which has been demolished.

That wall needs to be demolished and moved one roof-beam in towards the camera. And then with my patent narrow stairs I can fit a U-shaped stairway in.

The space that will be saved by having the stairs in a U-shape will be the bit by the window (at the foot of where the stairs are right now) and that’s where the shower room will be. I’m not sure if you can fit all of the OUSA Executive Committee in there, though.

I need to fit two floor beams in and that will be tomorrow afternoon’s job after I’ve demolished the rest of the wall.

bedroom les guis virlet puy de dome franceYes, I’ve gone berserk with a sledgehammer. And also a broom too.

And why not tomorrow morning? Well, Terry is coming round. He needs a hand to fetch some sand and as he has no tow-bar as yet on his new van to pull the trailer, we need to bag it up at the quarry.

Rhys and I were earlier talking about brassieres and the subject seemed to veer round to chastity belts. It reminded me of the time just before Nerina and I were married and we had to go to see the priest.
“Are you chaste?” he asked Nerina
“Quite often” I replied. “And she always lets me catch her“.

And in other news, Day 2 of this public enquiry is going down a storm. Apart from the Government’s case having fallen away to nothing already (and there’s another 9 months to go!), we have a plainted “(Iraq) had shown itself willing to use weapons of mass destruction on its own people and its neighbours and was flouting a range of UN disarmament resolutions.”. We know this of course from yesterday. It was our best friends the Septics who sold the weapons of mass destruction to Iraq and provided the intelligence to enable Iraq to use the weapons to the best effect. And it was also a whole series of British and American companies, in some cases aided and abetted by the British Government, who were encouraging Iraq to flout the resolutions.

But if you want to talk about a country that is using weapons of mass destruction on its own people and flouting a whole range of UN resolutions, where is the criticism of the Zionists and the crimes they are committing against the Palestinians, many of whom are Jews and some of whom – shock, horror – are CHRISTIANS?

And while we are on the subject of the Zionists, there’s this huge outcry about the fact than Iran may one day sometime have a nuclear bomb. Well, so what? The Zionists have plenty and no-one says anything about that. So if they have them, why can’t Iran have them to balance out the power? Keen students of british history will know that all through the 18th and 19th Century it was British foreign policy to keep the peace by having a balance of power.

During the period that the Soviet Union was “confronting” (which it wasn’t – it was strictly abiding by the terms of the Yalta Agreement) the west, the wars involving European powers were few and far between. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the USA and the UK have been dragging the world through the mud.

Vive la Soviet Union! say I.

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Tuesday 24th November 2009 – I lit a fire in my brassiere this evening.

home made brazier fireI started off by putting samples of all of the construction material that I had been using in the attic. And I’ll tell you – the effect is frightening. The plasterboard took the longest to burn but eventually it did. Everything else was gone in minutes.

No wonder there are so many conflagrations in domestic property. There won’t be much left of my place if it sets alight.

But the tidying up is progressing, and it’s looking quite impressive downstairs. Another day or so and it’ll be done. The pallets that formed the old floor in the attic, they will have to be chucked out of the window but I can’t move the broken slates yet. They are destined to be used for the footpaths between the raised beds in the new vegetable garden once make a start on that later this winter.

And once the tidying up is completed it will immediately become untidy again as I demolish the wall between the bedroom and the stairway. All the rubble will be used for making the steps outside up into the house.

Claude came round today for a chat and bought me some news. Someone has had a really good stroke of luck – an exceptional one in fact. It’s bad news for me as it happens but I suppose that if I stopped being selfish and looked at it from other people’s points of view I should really be pleased at their exceptional fortune.

I can’t say any more about it right now as there needs to be something of a proper announcement at the right time by the right people in the right places.

In other news, the public enquiry into the War to Steal Iraq’s Oil has got under way. Many people wonder why I call it that, but don’t take my word for it – take that of Australia’s Defence Minister Brendan Nelson.

But back to the plot. I was particularly impressed with the phrase “that Saddam had a “continuing intention” to acquire weapons of mass destruction, having used them in the past”. We all know by now that Saddam Hussein had Bacillus Anthracis, Clostridium Botulinum, Clostridium Perfringens, E coli, Histoplasma Capsulatum and Brucella Melitensis, and that he used them on Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war. And how do we know this? Because the USA sold them to him and then gave him the satellite photos of Iranian troop movements so that he knew where to aim the chemical weapons.

The other bit that drew my specific attention was that “the sanctions policy in place against Iraq since 1991 …was steadily breaking down”. Here’s one reason why it was breaking down. And here’s another one. And there are plenty more where those came from. No wonder the wheels fell off the sanctions policy when Western companies put greed before ethics and legality.

Another Western company implicated in the breach of sanctions was Matrix-Churchill. They were one of the companies, by the way, that were named and shamed by Michael Moore as having supplied chemical weapons to Iraq. And would their “breach of sanctions” have anything to do with Saddam’s “continuing intention to acquire weapons of mass destruction”? During the company’s trial in a British court for its alleged breach of sanctions, the directors of the company claimed that their breaches of sanctions had been guided by the British Intelligence (there’s an oxymoron) Services and the British Ministry of Defence.

This startling revelation so clearly shocked the Court that the British Minister for Trade, Alan Clark was summoned to give evidence and under oath he was obliged to admit that he had been “economical with the truth” in an earlier statement denying all knowledge of the affair. Of course, the trial collapsed and the directors were awarded compensation.

This entire Iraq affair stinks to high heaven.

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Tuesday 17th November 2009 – Today I’ve been fighting …

lean to wood pile… my way into the lean-to at the other side of the house. It was full of bricks and wood that I threw in there when I had a tidy-up a couple of years ago. The plan is to put my plant-pot beichstuhl on the inside to the left of the door, put all my gardening tools to the right, and fill up the rest with wood that I’ll be cutting through the winter and of course all of the scrap wood from the roof that is too bad to reuse. There’s tons of that.

It’s not quite working out like this though as the best-laid plans of mice, men and yours truly have a habit of going gang awa’, but at least I’m making slow progress.

If you have been following my website over the years you will maybe remember that it was into here that I was planning to move when the idea of coming here full-time was first discussed. But a casual survey of the roof showed that two of the beams had rotted and when I came to replace them it turned out that seven needed to be replaced and while I was taking some of them out part of the wall collapsed. And it was just after having rebuilt the wall that I was taken ill, and that was that.

In other news, following the collapse of the English-language newspaper, the SMADC – the French Government body charged with regenerating the Combrailles – has been looking at other ways to communicate with the English-speaking community over here and one idea currently being batted around is to have a 15-minute English-speaking spot every Sunday on the local radio station. They are looking for a radio presenter for the programme (if it goes ahead) and it seems that someone has thrown my hat into the ring.

In other other news, it’s been announced that a 90 year-old German is to be tried for a war crime dating back over 60 years. This follows the trial of an 88 year-old the other day. Can you imagine the scene in the court …
“How do you plead?”
“Not Guilty“
“What evidence do you have to disprove the accusations?”
“Well none, actually. The last of my defence witnesses died in 1972“
So what chance of a fair trial are these people going to get? It’s like the case of Demianjuk – even the Zionists found him Not Guilty of war crimes but he’s being hawked around country after country until someone can find a crime to pin on him. It’s a total disgrace.

These two guys are being tried for a handful of civilian deaths, yet night after night after night members of Bomber Command of the British Royal Air Farce flew over Germany deliberately targeting innocent civilians and massacred them by their hundreds of thousands. When is someone going to round them up and put them on trial for the horrific war crimes that they committed? And how many Russian soldiers were prosecuted for the atrocious war crimes that they committed against the German civilian population as they overran the Eastern provinces of Germany?

History is indeed written by the victors and never by the victims. Bah! Humbug!

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Sunday 27th September 2009 – SO WHERE DID I GO TODAY THEN?

In fact, events resolved themselves, as they usually do if you let them.

Today being Sunday, I didn’t set any alarm and slowly came to in a kind of leisurely fashion putting this weeks’s plans into some kind of shape.

After a while and having the urge to go for a Gipsy’s, I crawled out of bed to notice the time – 12:24 pm. That put paid to any plans I might have had to go out anywhere. It’s been a couple of times that I’ve done this just recently. It gives you an idea of how hard I’ve been working during the week, even if it doesn’t look much like it.

A leisurely breakfast followed by some generally inactive kind of tidying up in the verandah and in my room and that was that, effectively. I haven’t done anything else.

In other news, the Confederation of British Industries, desperately in need of some brownie points and trying hard to ingratiate itself with Gordon Clown’s government, has leapt onto the bandwagon of demanding higher tuition fees and cutting back on student support.

It’s the Leitch Report all over again.

“At a time of economic crisis, when many hard-working families are struggling to support their offspring through university, I am astonished that the CBI should be making such offensive recommendations,” said NUS president, Wes Streeting – the NUS being for the most part a bunch of naive wet-behind-the-ears adolescents.

So, where’s the quote from the OUSA President?

OUSA is (so we are led to believe) a bunch of 200,000 or so distinguished grown-ups actively pursuing academic excellence in their own time at their own pace? Could it be that the BBC forgot all about the existence of OUSA? Or was it that the President had nothing to say on the subject? Or was it that whatever the OUSA President had to say wasn’t worth quoting?

Whichever way you look at it, it just shows how inconsequential OUSA has become under the “leadership” of the last few years. No concept of a sense of history, no sense of grasping the important moment, no sense of pushing themselves and their ideas into the limelight.

When the ideas of the Leitch Report were first sprung onto the unsuspecting masses (I say “unsuspecting masses” because there were a couple of us who had seen the Leitch Report mentioned in a paper of February 2007 and tried our best, but in vain, to urge the remainder to take it seriously) do you know what the clowns did?

They organised a petition.

We did things like that in primary school. I worked for 12 years or so in a major multinational organisation, the largest of its kind in the world, and I can tell you what happens to petitions because we used to get thousands from all over Europe. What happened to the petitions was that the organisations’s budget for toilet paper was zero.

During the review of the Leitch Report, the British Government set up a committee to look into its effects on part-time Higher Education. The Open University is the largest supplier, by a country mile, of part-time Higher education in the UK, if not the world and has the most students of any educational establishment in the UK. So which University was asked to send a delegate to sit on the committee?

You’ve guessed it. Those well-known suppliers of part-time Higher Education, the … er … Staffordshire University, or North Staffs Poly as it used to be called when I studied Accountancy there in the 1970s.

At an Open University committee meeting, I asked if this appointment was a slap in the face for the Open University. I was told “no – you can’t expect the OU to sit on everything that involves part-time Higher Education”.
So I asked “why not? It’s larger than all the other suppliers combined” and “what other equivalent committees are there in existence currently that the OU sits on?”
And no-one was able to give me a reply.

But that’s where the OU and OUSA sit right now – treated with total contempt by Government and the major British press. And having met personally many representatives of those two organisations, I have to say that I am not in the least surprised.

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Friday 4th September 2009 – I’VE FINISHED THE POLYSTYRENE TODAY.

loft insulation space blanket les guis virlet puy de dome franceAll the silver has now turned to white, and there are lots of cables hanging down from the ceiling for the light fittings. I’m afraid that all the cables are buried, albeit in trunking, as I’m not planning any maintenance on them. I’m not sure what maintenance they might need.

Next task – which I should have finished today – is to turn the white into silver by putting up some battens on the wall and covering the wall with this insulation stuff.

loft insulation polystyrene les guis virlet puy de dome franceFrom Brico Depot tomorrow I’ll be buying the under-flooring – 22mm chipboard or OSB. That’s what I’ll be fitting when the wall has been insulated.

But I need the shower base (I’ll try not to drop it tomorrow) as I have to design the shower room and then alter the floor plan of the attic to take into account where the bathroom will be – one or two beams neeed repositioning and we need some pillars. So that’s not going to be straightforward.

Once the floor is in (my task for next week once the insulation is done) I can get the plasterboard for the walls. I’m going for the standard with a backing of 40mm of insulation. All in all, that will be a hell of a lot of insulation.

After that, I need to reposition the stairs and to put up a false wall to keep the stairs enclosed and stop the heat disappearing.

Which reminds me – this insulation is working. For the last two days the highest temperature in the attic has been higher than the highest temperature in my little room, and also, I put my had down the back of the polystyrene as i was fitting the last piece, and there was definitely heat being trapped in there.

I’m not bothered about the quality of the flooring though. I’ll be fitting some laminate over the top which will cover it nicely.

And talking of temperature, the summer has now ended. 2 consecutive days of rain (3 of the last 4 have seen rain) and I have a jacket on in here. Winter is definitely on its way.

In other news, I see that the Septics are up in arms about Iran appointing a suspected terrorist as a Government minister. The hypocrisy is unbelievable and you certainly couldn’t make up a story like this one.

Just WHO do they think that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of the Northern Irish government are? And the Septics brokered the peace deal that put them in power.

Of course you might be thinking that Adams and McGuinness are white and not brown or black and that makes all the difference as far as Americans are concerned – but that can’t be it. Didn’t the Septics fete Nelson Persondela when he became President of South Africa?

And never mind the “suspected terrorist” – he was actually a convicted terrorist and furthermore, the reason why he did the full 27 years and didn’t get parole was because he refused to renounce violence as a means of furthering his political aims (and one of the best definitions of a terrorist is “someone who resorts to violence to further his political aims”).

It’s just further proof of another famous definition associated with terrorists – namely “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” If the Septics and most of the British can pull their heads out of their nether regions for 5 minutes and take a dispassionate view of what’s happening in the world today, they can see that what the Iraqis are dojng in Iraq against the Americans and what the Afghans are doing in Afghanistan to the NATO farces, it’s no different to what the French and the Yugoslav and the other resistants did to the Nazis who had overrun their countries.

And the response by the American and NATO farces is no different to what the Nazis did to the resistants. Never mind your “illegal foreign combatants” in Iraq and Afghanistan – what about the British and other forces that were parachuted in to occupied Europe in the period 1942-45?

This current western hypocrisy makes me sick

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Tuesday 11th August 2009 – I’VE BEEN PAINTING FOR MOST OF THE DAY.

With all of the slates off the roof, it seemed like the right thing to do. All of the beams and rafters that are still up there have had two coats of xylophene and one coat of LIDL wood treatment.

And they needed the xylophene too. One or two of them have some pretty big bug holes and galleries so they have been well-soaked in the stuff. They aren’t too badly damaged so it’s not worth replacing them. The xylophrene should do the job.

But it was pretty awkward painting them as they are too long to paint in one go, too short to do in two goes, there’s a central beam right where I want to put my chest when I’m lying full-length and a scaffolding just above my head. So I’ve been in some awkward positions and I’ve got aches in some places I didn’t even realise I had.

Three rafters are pretty bad though – the two outer ones and one of the inners. But I have about 20 here so I cut three to size and gave them two coats of xylophene and two coats of LIDL wood treatment.

All in all I used about 8 litres of xylophrene (good job Brico Depot had some 35-litre drums the other day) and 5 litres of the LIDL stuff. I always buy a few tins of it when I see it on offer and I’m glad I had a stock. I’m now down to just three so I’m hoping they’ll have some more pretty soon.

Tomorrow I’ll be fitting the new beams and cementing them in place ready to fit the plywood over the top. Then the damp-proof membrane and then the slates. No insulation and no laths either.

In other news, my potential customer came round. I thought that I could talk, but I’m an amateur by comparison. Still, we have to be nice to our potential customers (something that a certain UK company might wish to take on board) and I’ll go round to inspect his premises once my roof is done.

And in other other news, I see that Aung San Sun Kyi is to continue in detention, much to the chagrin of the entire western world. Now I’m not going to get involved in the rights and wrongs of her case (although followers of my organ from many years back will recall my involvement with the myserious and exotic War War Soe who came dramatically into my life for a while in Belgium and who tried to get me to help her escape Burmese justice) but one thing that I have noticed is that not one single western source has mentioned exactly WHY it is that Aung San Sun Kyi is so detested by the Burmese Authorities.

And so I hasten to put the matter straight for the record, so that in the words of the late, great FE Smith,even if you are none-the-wiser, you will certainly be better-informed.

The fact is that Aung San’s father was a former Burmese general prior to World War II. He mysteriously disappeared and later fetched up in, of all places, Japan, where the Japanese feted him and honoured him, lavished loads of money on him and so on. He then went back to Burma.

In 1941 when the Japanese colonial expansion got into top gear there was a revolution in Burma. And who should be leading this revolution, but Aung San’s father. He invited the Japanese into Burma to help with the “liberation” and of course it is no surprise that they duly obliged.

I’m not going into the horrors of the Japanese “liberation” (see “occupation” or “colonialisation”) of Burma as they are fully-recorded in all kinds of other places, but most people lay them fairly and squarely at the feet of Aung San’s father.

it’s no surprise therefore that the establishment of Burma is deeply suspicious of Aung San’s motives and cannot understand why it should be that she is calling herself as a “true democrat”. To give you some idea, just imagine what westerners would say if a child of Adolf Hitler were to stand for election as a Communist in Germany.

LIke I say, I’m not going to get into the rights and wrongs of what is happening in Burma right now, but it’s important that both sides have an equal opportunity to have their views aired, something that is sadly lacking in the west these days.

And on the same day that a 90 year old German is convicted of war crimes dating from World War II and jailed for life, the hypocrisy of the western world in criticising Burma for dealing with its own World War II legacy in its own fashion is quite simply staggering.

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Friday 31st July 2009 – POWER CORRUPTS

380 watts of solar power on roof les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd 390 watts of solar power will corrupt me absolutely.

Terry and I put the framework up on the roof and then fitted three of the solar panels. They are all wired up and while the three on the roof of the Luton Transit were recording 1 amp in the early evening, these three were chucking out 10 times that. In fact, in the period between 17:30 and 20:30 I’d received about 20 amp-hours-worth. Mind you the panels are situated right on the sunniest corner of the roof – the part of the roof where the sunshine lingers longest.

And just imagine what it’s going to be like when the other 3 are up there with these.

We had a rethink about the design of the framework. Solar panels are most effective when offered perpendicularly to the sun at the shortest day of the year. Here in central France that’s about 68 degrees. But being restricted by the roof windows, the panels are having to overhang the apex of the roof as you can see. And setting them at 68 degrees would have this huge sail-effect over the roof catching the stormy north winds head-on. It’s for that reason that I’ve set them parallel to the roof slope – to make sure that they don’t catch the wind so much.

You can see how we fitted them – saddle clamps onto standard B-size galvanised tube with tube clamp fittings onto U-profile aluminium channel with holes drilled in to let the water pass. We didn’t have enough saddle clamps (followers of my blog from its previous location will recall the story about that!) so we made our own.

You can also see the two roof windows and the space-age insulation that I’ve been using. It’s all pretty impressive stuff.

In other news, you may recall Dinsdale nailing someone’s head to a coffee table for having “transgressed the unwritten law”
“well what did you do?”
“he didn’t tell me. But he gave me his word, and that’s good enough for me with old Dinsy”

Back in 1970 we laughed at that, thinking that it was just another example of Monty Python’s outrageous comedy. We never ever thought that it would come true. But in the UK in 2009 this kind of thing has become fact and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

To summarise, a person in the UK has been detained under house arrest on charges that have not been communicated to him. A court order has instructed the Home Secretary to publish the information that relates to his detention, and rather than publish the information the Home Secretary has dropped the charges – and then applied for a different detention order. This will of course be the subject of a further appeal to the High Court, which will pass a similar order, leading to the charges being dropped, and a different detention order being applied for.

And so the cycle will continue while a totally bewildered detainee, who doesn’t know the charges and evidence against him and so can’t defend himself, will remain in detention ad infinitum while the UK Government take the mickey out of the High Court. If it was a civilian doing this kind of thing there would be a “contempt of court” writ in the mail the same night, and back in the old days when a Government tried on this kind of behaviour with a case as serious as “The Moors Murders” with Hindley and Brady, it was threatened with an “Abuse of Process” writ, but in the UK today there is a government that thinks that it is above all legal challenge.

You obviously can’t make up a story like this, but just in case you think that I am pulling your leg, you can read all about it here. But I just don’t know how the British public have become so paranoid that they are prepared to put up with all of the carp that the Government is feeding them. When the IRA was blowing mainland Britain to bits there was none of this nonsense. But of course the IRA is all white-skinned Catholics financed by the USA and in the UK today someone’s skin colour plays a major part in the way in which they are being treated by the Government and the British citizens.

Shame on you all!

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Wednesday 29th July 2009 – NO PHOTOS TODAY, PEOPLE.

And it’s hardly surprising. Terry was round early and we got on the roof and carried on slating. This required some intricate work around the roof windows and I surprised myself by being prepared for such an eventuality with some stainless steel screws and silicone-backed washers.

After lunch we were back up there to carry on but by now it was 35 degrees and everything on the roof was so hot that it was agonising to pick anything up. No use in working so at 14:30 we called it a day.

Terry went home to his good lady and I took a book and a drink into the comfort and safety of the water room. Once the sun moved from out of direct line with the roof I got back up on the scaffolding and painted the underneath of the eaves with xylophrene, a product that protects wood against dry rot, wet rot and nasty little pests (that’ll stop members of OUSA’s Executive Committee visiting me) and then with some of the brown wood preservative.

During all of this I had a visit from Tijas and his mum and so a guided tour was organised.

After all of that I was exhausted and it took me all of my best efforts to cook some food. I’m going to have to find myself a willing assistant for that kind of thing.

In other news, you simply cannot believe how craven the UK has become. Refusing to disclose the torture undergone by a British subject by the Americans in Cuba, on the grounds that the USA won’t share any more secrets with the Brits. Terry and I had a chat the other day about how pathetic the UK is becoming. Most Brits believe that it is still a significant world power yet as these events go to show, the UK is nothing more than an insignificant offshore island and a mere puppet of Great Satan. HIgh time all of the Brits grew up and had a good look around them. But with 24-hour drinking and 500 channels on the TV all showing “Corrie” and Big Bother, it just goes to prove that 99% of the population of the UK is totally brain-dead.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was all about bread and circuses, and I don’t see much difference.

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