You can't always get what you want

For reasons that perhaps make sense to him upstairs, many of life’s more sophisticated pleasures seem to be passing me by at the moment, leaving me with echoes of Mick’s anthemic vocals ringing in my head. Fortunately, there is still happiness aplenty to be found in simpler pursuits, such as a bout of manual labour.

I was lucky enough recently to spend a few days of gloriously unexpected springtime sunshine working outside in an area of fabulous beauty, with spectacular views over the North Cornwall coast, down to the Camel River near Wadebridge, which, at this time of year, is girding its estuarial loins for the tourist assault that begins with the Easter holidays. My working holiday was spent helping my brother-in-law prepare for the forthcoming season of his alternative holiday company, Yurtworks, by building a new solar-heated shower for the visitors.

As always, the design for the shower room is bursting with individuality: Tim never does things the easy way, partly because there are tight planning restrictions in such special environments and partly because inside his head is a busy place to be. There was, undoubtedly, a plan in there somewhere, and fortunately it was one that allowed for a satisfying amount of just the sort of building work I enjoy most: making it up as you go along!

And, because we were working in wood, nothing could be easier. It’s such a flexible material: you can chisel away a bit here or add an extra brace there; you can glue, screw or pin it; you can bend it – as Tim has done with the frame for this larch construction ­– and generally tweak it to your exact needs.

Apparently there have been a number of enquiries from local authorities who are keen to use this eco-friendly building style in toilets for allotments and similar public spaces: it ticks all the right boxes, as it were. So we were aware, as we put it together, that this may only be a draft of the final version, something that could be produced by others in a consistent (aka fool-proof) style. (And even then, as anyone who works regularly with the public will confirm, a fool-proof system is no match for a system-proof fool.)

We certainly made some mistakes on the way, but these were easily corrected or, as in the question of how to fill the end panel, were solved by some lateral thinking. Initially we looked at cladding this with larch or with tongue-and-groove timber. We then considered whether it should be partly lined with canvas to repel the inevitable spray from the shower. But, as we chatted through the options in the sun, Tim suddenly suggested that we fill the space with glass or, with safety in mind, with Perspex so that the showerist might feel at one with the moss-covered ancient oaks immediately behind the building.

Fortunately there are no neighbours to shock, but that doesn’t mean your ablutions would be un-observed. I’ve found that whenever I’m working outside, whether it’s a suburban street or a rural idyll, I tend to get a few passers-by stopping to see what’s going on. In Cornwall, the onlookers were a family of wallabies that have ‘gone native’ in this area, having escaped from a nearby visitor park some years ago. We nodded at each other in a companionable way, as we all enjoyed the sunshine and the special magic of these secluded, ancient woods.

I’ve done enough of it to know that physical work can be boring, dangerous and unpleasant. But, at its best, it is a rich and satisfying pleasure to get your hands dirty, to witness a curved and gracious structure emerging from the ground and take its place in such a special environment.

Maybe you can’t always get what you want, but, as Sir Michael Jagger so eloquently put it, sometimes ‘You get what you need…’.

The hills are alive

Turn!

Keep pushing your knees forward so you can feel the front of your calves against the top of the boots.

Woah!

Keep your ankles together and ‘edge’ the skis into the ice. Keep breathing.

And another!

Keep concentrating! Don’t think about that kid who just shot past you. How? Don’t look up!

One more…!

Get ready to make the next, probably on that bit of loose snow about ten feet away. Jab your pole into the ice so that the weight comes off the back of your skis, lifting up and…

Swoosh round!

Come down on the metal edges so you don’t slide and get ready for the next one. Never enough time. You’re always going too fast! But you’re in a rhythm now and…

Go!

Don’t look down: you can’t afford to get scared at how steep this is, even though you can hear the front of the skis clattering together as you try, desperately, not to let them cross because…well…don’t even go there!

Hup. Yes!

Keep leaning downhill even though your body says it’s insane to let your weight carry you down on this kind of slope. If you lean back, you’ll lose control. Ready? No!

Do it!

You’re 100% engaged in just surviving. Your legs are working at the max. Adrenaline is pumping through you and all your senses are fully alert. You see everything. You hear everything. You feel very, very alive.

You don’t have to have had any of those ‘life flashing before the eyes’ moments to know that the mind can speed up at times of crisis. So it was somehow not surprising that, in the midst of these hectic few minutes, a series of completely unnecessary phrases popped into my already bursting consciousness.

As I approached the end of the high-speed run, I found myself shouting with joy at what I was not doing: ‘Not shopping!’. Turn. Edge those skis. ‘Not driving!’ Turn. Keep it tight. ‘Not cooking!’ Turn. Keep the weight forward. ‘Not in meetings!’ Turn. Focus and remember to breathe. ‘Not on the computer!’

You get the idea. Some people get their kicks from driving fast; others from singing in choirs. But, for me, the adrenaline rush I got from blasting perhaps 1000m down the Arbis run at Morzine was as good as it gets, combining as it does the natural elements of the purest air, the absence of a motor of any kind, and the simple, if jaw-dropping, effect of gravity.

A lifetime ago, at the top of this little corner of France, I had witnessed a panoramic view that is considered by some to be the best in the Alps. And, as I arrived at the bottom, whooping with excitement, what should I find but a small hut that served undoubtedly the best vin chaud in the whole of Les Portes du Soleil.

A la prochaine!

Indecisive? Moi?

I recently did two things that I’ve never done before.

The first came about when I was using a well-known online search engine to try to look up the location of a pub. I had already found the postcode and was on the verge of typing it into the search box, when my fingers faltered. There followed a short but significant pause as a number of conflicting messages passed between my brain and my hands, the latter of which were hovering expectantly over the keyboard. Eventually a life-changing decision was reached, chemicals flashed across nerve synapses and my muscles reacted, causing me to type the following momentous combination: bs228ly.

As someone who takes a keen interest in the whole process of using words to say exactly what I mean, I’ve always been particular about the finer points of punctuation, spelling and grammar because they make it possible for me to express exactly what I’m trying to say to the widest number of people. Well, all three of you at least. That’s not the same thing as being a pedant, though I probably get ticks in that box as well. It’s just that I want my life to be simple

The proliferation of new media, starting with emails, then SMS texts, instant-messaging services, and now twitter (not Twitter… I checked), has opened up new questions for the baby boomer generation, of which I am fortunate to be a part. Are we going to bother? Are we going to try to be cool? And, most importantly, does it matter if we use capital letters for postcodes? To which the answers are Yes, too young to give up; No, too young to start; and… well, it seems I may have answered that last question already.

My first step down this particular slippery slope came when I worked out that your average search engine is unconcerned with how I phrase my questions; it will perform its work equally well however I type in my query. It was some time ago when I graduated from searches such as ‘Can I make a banana cake without using eggs?’ to ‘no egg cake banana’. So maybe the die is already cast. If you do nothing else after reading this, go and reacquaint yourself with George Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch, one of whose main themes is how we avoid explicitly making decisions until we find that life has, somehow, made them for us.

I blame technology, not myself, for my continued decline, because your average search engine, in addition to being blind to poor syntax, is also completely un-judgemental about spelling. It will, for example, without critical comment of any kind, happily ask whether you meant to type ‘asymmetrical parallel capacitor’ instead of ‘asmetrical paralllel kapasitor’. Whatever is the point of knowing how to spell parallel if no-one cares?

I know that I’ve been swimming against the tide for some time, labouring under the misapprehension that you get better exercise that way. However, it was, as I say, a significant and completely new moment for me when I chose to stop paddling and go with the flow. bs228ly was that landmark moment. wtvr nxt?

Did I mention two new things? Before I reveal the second, I’ll have to ask you to sign a confidentiality clause because my reputation is on the line with this one. It’s not that I have split an infinitive or forgotten my gerunds. It’s another momentous decision that appears to have been reached somewhere in my mind when I was looking the other way. As you know, I’ve been battling with some pretty low temperatures in this house recently. After many years of declaring that hell would freeze over before…, without any announcement or fanfare, I quietly switched on the electric blanket on the other, unvisited side of my bed and, an hour later, got in accompanied by a hot-water bottle. Sssssh – can you hear the sound of ice forming?

A tale of two systems

You find me not with my head but my feet in the oven. I haven’t fallen out with my girlfriend or had a particularly unhappy Christmas. It’s because part of my central heating has broken down. With the benefit of hindsight I can say with confidence that it is a very minor fault but it will take many hours of mind-bending phone calls and about 15 minutes of actual work to fix.

To explain why we must embark on a tale of two systems and the hapless souls trapped therein. It’s a journey that may, I fear, lead us back into the murky fields of customer service mentioned in a previous entry but there’s every hope that we will emerge, blinking into the bright light of a new dawn in shiny happy customer relations. Yeh, right.

Such is the complexity of our domestic infrastructure that you might care to skip the rather lengthy first movement. I would have done so myself but I wasn’t offered that option. Maybe rejoin us at the second movement?

First movement: andante con brio
Paradoxically the new extension on our house - the bit with energy-efficient glass and weather-responsive thermostats – is attached to a second-hand combined boiler and oven that is similar in design and construction to an Aga but rather less expensive. Let’s give it a good old fashioned, no-nonsense name like Stanley, if only because that’s what it’s called. Periodically Stanley roars into life, deafening conversation, using hugely expensive amounts of gas every second and burning my loaves in no time flat. We love it.

Behind this slightly tattered, hot black box is a medium-sized cupboard in which Mark, our hunky plumber, created a dizzying array of pipes, valves and expansion vessels so complicated and mysterious that it serves as the high point of any tour of our house. ‘And here,’ I proudly exclaim, as I throw open the door to this Aladdin’s cave, ‘is the control centre!’

Nearby, in our old-fashioned larder (or should that be a pantry?), sits an unobtrusive white box on the wall. Let’s call it CBR54a. It occasionally hums a bit and has a light to tell you that it’s efficiently and economically heating up the rest of the house.

It is to the servicing of these two different systems that our path leads. Stanley is checked out annually by the only company in my part of the world that seems to know anything about his raw, northern ways - a husband and wife team who live very happily in the 1980s. Once a year Mandy rings me up to tell me that Alan will be over next week and could I please remember to switch Stanley off the night before because, otherwise, he’s too hot to work on and Alan will have a wasted journey! (I didn’t and he did once.) When our little dogs were alive, the first thing Alan would always do was to play with them, while he drank his first cup of coffee, and say how he and Mandy had always wanted dogs like this. Eventually he’d get his stuff from the van and, still chatting, would begin the delicate operation of de-coking Stanley.

As for CBR54a, John South send me a reminder letter every year and we fix a day when their plumber can call. We never saw Mark again. He had evidently moved on to advanced rocketry installation and left servicing of his creations to lesser mortals…a succession of young men who all look very smart but whose first move is always, worryingly, to open the instruction manual.

I was away when my son sent me a text asking why the house was cold but, as soon as I returned I could see why: the boiler was dead. Not Stanley, the old work horse. But CBR54a, the smart, always-efficient, and recently serviced boiler.

Thank you for staying with me through the first movement, as it were. Stop here for a comfort break if you’d like. My feet are nice and warm thanks but I’ll just pop on a hat. Welcome back those who chose to skip the preamble. You join us as we attempt to revive CBR54a.

Second movement: allegro moderato
I called John South. Yes, they could send a chap out to look at it. He arrived the next day and diagnosed the problem as a faulty circuit board. They had one in stock and could fit it the next day. Total damage £300. Done.

At this point, for some absurd reason, the word ‘insurance’ popped into my mind. When I renewed my household insurance policy back in the autumn, I noticed that it included a section on household emergencies. ‘Oh, I won’t be needing that’ I quipped to the salesman, ‘I tend to fix most things myself and the boilers are serviced annually anyway.’ I can’t now quite remember how he persuaded me. There was some discussion about legal cover and the cost of taking things off a policy. And it was only a few pounds. So, rather grudgingly, I kept it.

Now in my hour of need, it seemed a shame not to use it. I rang the broker who was positive: yes, they did cover this and I only needed to ring their helpline to sort it out. I should have spotted the warning signs: a freephone, national number, a customer reference number, a call management system – all indicative that I was moving into a parallel universe where service engineers provide complete solutions that delight customers, not one where blokes in vans come to fix things.

I got through in the end, despite an unexpectedly high volume of calls. (Did I mention that it was Christmas? Not just any old Christmas, but Christmas 2010: the coldest snap for 40 years. Lots of pipes freezing, people with feet in ovens. Busy time for plumbers…and insurance companies.) I was allocated a slot several days later when their engineer could come and check CBR54a for himself to confirm that it was indeed a circuit board that had died. It took him about three minutes to do this and a bit longer to find out that they didn’t hold stock but a replacement could be ordered and was promised to arrive in two days time…about five days after John South could have fixed it. And counting.

I am sure that wise and intelligent readers such as yourself will not be surprised to hear that the circuit board wasn’t faulty at all. We found that out when the new board was fitted and nothing happened. All credit to the engineer who diagnosed that there was in fact a break in the power supply, which he fixed before firing up the boiler and disappearing into the snow and ice, together with a our seasonal good wishes and thanks.

Cue sound effect of hollow laughter. How was he to know that there was another, second fault? It took us a couple of days, as we piled on extra layers of clothing and the temperature in the house continued to hover around zero before I called the insurance hotline again and explained that we needed yet another service engineer to make our complete solution complete.

Third movement: alla zingarese
At this point, it all gets a bit surreal. Imagine you’re part of the Alan and Mandy team who service Stanleys for a select but loyal group of customers in the south west. Like lots of small, self employed people who are on the road most of the time, you invest in a little PDA or laptop with your customers' details and appointment times.

Now imagine that one day your system crashes - it's a case of When not If - and, because life is too short, you don’t have a back up. So you have to scrabble through lots of invoices and post-it notes to find telephone numbers and ring all your customers, explaining that, sorry, damned computers and all that, you’ll need to make another appointment. Phew! Big job, lots of embarrassment but you get it done.

Now imagine how you'd feel the next day when the same thing happens again. How would you possibly begin to explain to your bemused clients that, not only has your system crashed again, but you completely failed to learn the lessons of the day before by making a copy of some kind? Alan might get away with it but what if you’re not a two-man company but a massive, national organisation who relies on sophisticated logistics to manage your vast work force?

Fourth movement: Misterioso
We are now perhaps at the heart of this jolly tale. I know it’s been a bit of a slog and it may seem that I have a bit of problem with large companies. But I’m sure not alone in finding it bit odd that their response to the above question is: you don’t bother to try and explain because you don’t have to.
‘But you phoned me only yesterday to offer me an appointment when I already had one,’ I pointed out.
‘Ah yes, there was a fault in the system of the company who refer all these dockets to us: it just deleted them all,’ was the reply. As if that explained anything.
‘Can I make another appointment for you now?’

It deleted them all!! What kind of inefficient, tinpot company could possibly allow that to happen? Well, actually, it was one of the biggest emergency repair companies in the country. One of those whose vans almost certainly shout about ‘total solutions delighting our customers’. Total garbage more like. And not a hint of apology or remorse. I’m just a cog in this giant wheel. Not my problem. Do you want an appointment or not?

In the immortal words of the Spice Girls, ‘I’ll tell you want I want,’ and I suspect that it’s not available in this particular plumbing universe. Next time I’ll rely on ordinary people who look at the whole job, not just their bit of it. They may be small but they are sufficiently in touch with the real world to understand what customers really want.

All together now: big can be beautiful; national can be great; insurance can be reassuring ….but don’t bet on it. For the record, CBR54a was fixed in the end, though I’d gone to spend Christmas in Cornwall by that time. I’m choosing small, local and flexible next time. If I can walk that is: my feet are beginning to smoulder.