Category Archives: Rants&Rambles

Picnic

After a tennis match, the Home team provides a meal for the 12 people who have played. Since our club is tiny and comes without a kitchen, we all take some food along and essentially have a picnic afterwards.

So looking forward to the next match, I’m thinking that we’ll have something along the following:

  • Puff Pastry Tart – essentially an assemble job with tomato sauce, pesto and antipasti leftover from the weekend
  • Potato and leek frittata – basically the stuff you find at the bottom of your fridge and cupboards
  • Green salad (probably Nigel Slaters, fennel salad with parmesan dressing)
  • Tabbouleh, though maybe using quinoa rather than cracked wheat because I’ve got some cooked lying around in the fridge.

And someone will bring along either bread and butter, a fruit salad or pre-prepared desert like tiramisu, whilst another will bring wine and beer to the party.

& even though it’s all very simple and easy to make it will taste brilliant after three hours playing tennis.

Today

Wake up and reach for the coffee.

Deal with the dead (almost mummified) mouse corpse behind the fireplace. So much for the cat sitter not finding any rodents.

Discover the very lively mouse cowering at the back of the grate, and with the help of two out of three cats, corner it and trap it in a glass. It looks like we’re back to the days of our mouse “catch and release” programme.

Have a couple of conversations with the neighbours whilst re-locating the mouse including the guys with the bruiser who terrorises my babies. Managed to keep it civil. His fat cat has been put on a diet, which might explain some of it’s grumpy menace.

Elsewhere agreed to visit my very elderly next-door neighbour to ostensibly to chat about her garden, but basically to schedule some time to chat see how she’s getting on. Wondering vaguely whether there will be people around to take an interest in us when we’re in our 90s or whether it will even be considered normal or acceptable to show an interest in your elderly neighbours. Obviously I am also hugely interested in her lovely garden as well, not least because it’s always great to crib ideas.

Lunch.

Had a tennis lesson and got things together for tonight’s mini-tournament of mixed doubles.

Looked through the garden now that the weather has broken to a more manageable 25C to determine what has survived and what has not. There are lots of gaps up on the gravel roof after 6 weeks of no rain and 30C and some surprising survivals. One of the perennial wallflowers has died but there’s another in a pot to replace it. All of the roses and iris have survived (some judicious watering while we were away).

Engaged in a few political conversations on-line to absolutely no obvious effect, but at least I’ve tried. I find the current political climate entirely without rhyme or reason.

Sorted through some more of the photos from Iceland – still difficult to believe that it was so grey and gloomy – and finding it odd that it’s such a difficult country to photograph well. Maybe the landscapes are just too big to capture easily.  Certainly the details are much more easily captured with endless decent pictures of cute puffins.

& now I’m off to taxi the kids around. Surely by now they should be driving themselves, even in London?

Stockpile versus Hoarding

So my country has gone from madness to political madness and now people are seriously talking about the need to stockpile food in the event we bomb out of the EU onto WTO only rules. The UK produces just 60% of its own food. It is curiously unprepared for obligatory self-sufficiency, or even the kind of delays that a sudden change in customs might require for a just-in-time supply chain for supermarkets.

Living in relatively wealthy London will either be a decisive advantage or disadvantage. We have a lot of people living in close proximity to each other, which means more people fighting over the final few tomatoes in the shop, but it also means that the first place people will bring their goods to sell will be well-to-do London, where people can afford the higher prices and the stuff can be sold quickly and easily.

What sort of stockpile of food might we put together?

Sweden’s government delivered leaflets to 4.8m Swedish households, inviting them to consider how they could best cope in a situation of “major strain … in which society’s normal services are not working as they usually do”. The government had in mind all kinds of crises – natural disasters, terrorism, cyber attacks, all-out war – but the basic survival strategy for all of them was the food hoard.

The leaflet recommended that every home lay down a stock of non-perishables:

  • specifically breadstuffs with a long shelf-life (the leaflet mentioned tortillas and crackers),
  • dried lentils and beans,
  • tinned hummus and sardines,
  • ravioli,
  • rice,
  • instant mashed potato,
  • energy bars

Switzerland has long had a similar sense of foreboding: legislation passed in the cold war still demands that every citizen has access to a nuclear shelter. But the list of recommended foods to be kept in the larder (or bunker) in case the worst happens is, as one would expect of Switzerland, more thorough. “Tick the items you need on the following list … and ensure that you always have them in stock” is the advice of the Swiss civil defence authorities. The list begins with

  • nine litres of water per person (for an emergency lasting three or four days)
  • pepper and salt,
  • dry sausage,
  • dried fruit and pulses,
  • tinned meat and fish,
  • hard cheese,
  • pet food and
  • condensed milk, chocolate, sugar, jam, honey and crispbread.

And I don’t seriously believe that the water supply would be threatened so I’ll not be building up a stock of water bottles, but I am considering some of the rest. I’m also considering stockpiling some alcohol to get us through the first few months of readjustment to this brave new world. My list looks something like this:

  • wine, beer, cider
  • breadstuffs with a long life, crackers, crispbread and pastry snacks
  • lentils and beans, whether dried, tinned or packaged ready-to-eat
  • dried pasta
  • olive oil
  • rice, especially carnaroli/arborio
  • spices, ketchup, long life bottled/canned chilli sauce, garlic puree, ginger puree, tomato puree,
  • dark chocolate
  • dried pet food

And all of this fades into total insignificance compared to the risks to the medical supply chain into the UK.

No insulin is made in the UK: it can’t be by March.  So a no deal Brexit threatens our insulin supply according to medicines regulator Sir Michael Rawlings.

What are the government going to do to prevent type-1 diabetics dying ?

English

My daughters are English. I am not. We all live in England, but in London so does that really count? What does it mean to feel yourself to be first and foremost English and only British as an afterthought?

A lot has been written since 2016 about whether the Brexit vote marked an eruption of English nationalism.  Explicit English nationalism remains nonexistent or dormant, not active, unlike other nationalisms in these islands. That the Brexit vote was, in part, an immense expression of English identity is, on the other hand, beyond dispute.

Recently the BBC has been reporting on English identity. Most of it is based on a large survey by YouGov that explores the language, contours and contexts of that identity. Its findings should be a real wake-up call for anybody who is serious about modern British politics, especially on the left.

The fundamental finding in the BBC’s English Question surveys is that 80% of people in England strongly self-identify as English.

On one level this is hardly surprising. England is where they live. It’s where most of them were born. But let the idea and its implications sink in. And note also that there are almost no exceptions at all. This isn’t just coastal towns or leafy lanes. In every region, every class, every age group and almost every other demographic subset, a majority strongly  self-identifies as English. The only subset exceptions, though they are important ones, are black and minority-ethnic adults (but only by a whisker), people who self-identify as British not English, and people of other nationalities altogether.

Almost as important a finding, however, is that a strong sense of English identity actively coexists with other identities. Again, this is hardly surprising. Which of us self-identifies as one thing alone?

The most common of these other identities, not surprisingly, is a British one, with 82% strong identification. On this, with the sole exception of other nationalities, every subset in the survey (this time including black and minority-ethnic adults) strongly identifies with Britishness . Additionally, half of the survey strongly feel an English regional identity – up to 74% in the north-east. Around a quarter strongly feel European too.

There is much else in the BBC/YouGov survey, most notably it shows that whilst the Scottish and Welsh are optimistic about where they and their region are heading, the English are pessimistic and look to recreate their past.

The greatest contributors to English identity, the survey suggests, are the natural landscape and the nation’s history. The strongest image of England is a pre-industrial bucolic nation populated by well-mannered and virtuous citizens. People generally see England as conservative and traditional rather than liberal and outward-looking.

There is more than a hint of nostalgia about people’s sense of Englishness. Almost three times as many of its residents think England was ‘better in the past’ than believe its best years lie in the future.

In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, by contrast, significantly more people think their country’s best years lie ahead rather than behind them.

So while the rest of the UK feels pretty optimistic about their prospects, England seems particularly glum. The more English people feel, the more retrospective they are, and English wistfulness is particularly strong among those who voted to leave in the Brexit referendum.

England’s Christian tradition is important for almost half of Leave voters, but only 29% of remain voters. Leave voters are significantly more likely to talk of Englishness in terms of history, fair play, tolerance, plain-speaking and friendliness than those who wanted to remain

Many on the left prefer the silence. Some find England embarrassing – a “not in my name” country. Many prefer to navigate the multiple identities of Britishness while leaving the self-identifying English alone. As a result the left of centre is not much represented in the English conversation.  Nationalism and Englishness is often conflated by those on the political left where as those on the right of politics seem determined to present a pastiche.

Labour embodies this unease. Few Labour policy documents mention England at all, even when they concern policy areas such as the health service or education, which are devolved and on which, therefore, “national” policy actually means English policy.

Faced with English identity, Jeremy Corbyn is little different from Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. This week Brown made a fine speech about bringing the country together with a programme of reforms. Yet the word England appeared just once in his speech, and only in the context of English regionalism, not English identity. It is hard to think of any senior Labour politician since Tony Benn or Michael Foot who talked about England with any degree of comfort. Their view of England may have been unduly romantic and radical, but at least it existed.

This isn’t intended as a bash-Labour point. For the most part, Labour is no better and no worse than anybody else on the liberal left in this regard. There are honourable exceptions, notably the former minister John Denham, no longer in parliament but actively pushing his English Labour Network. A recent Institute for Public Policy Research speech by the maverick shadow cabinet member Jon Trickett was another important recognition of the need for a political conversation to develop on the left that includes, not ignores, England.

England is not going to go away. And the current English mood is a challenge to every aspect of the progressive tradition. As the BBC/YouGov survey shows, England is not just a place with a real sense of identity. It is also a pessimistic place. Most people in the survey think England was better in the past. The pessimism is widely shared across all parts of England. Only one in six people in England think the country’s best years lie ahead of it.

But this pessimism is not something that need embarrass the progressive traditions in politics. There isn’t much sign of a harking back to whiteness or for the empire. It’s about feeling that the country is incredibly beautiful, has a rich history, and is witty and polite. But the country also used to make things, used to matter more, used to be more caring and connected.

The England that cries out from this survey is not at ease, is disempowered, is disconnected from Westminster and insufficiently able to shape its own future at local, never mind national, level.

English identity is a cultural issue that requires more than just a constitutional answer. Nevertheless, England is the largest nation in Europe without its own parliament and it has become difficult to argue against one, with powers similar to those in the rest of the UK. An English parliament would force the progressive wing of politics to engage seriously with England’s mood and England’s needs. Compared with an English parliament, combined or regional authorities just don’t cut it.

And what is the alternative? If the progressive tradition in British politics cannot find ways of listening to, connecting with and speaking for England, its sense of itself and its sense of place, it risks not just electoral failure but the loss of a much larger argument. To cede the politics of England to the right is to ensure that it is the right that speaks for England. That seems to be what is happening.

Stress testing

All my babies are home. One of them is back from university and staring an internship to try and get some job experience, the other is in the middle of her A levels.

The first exam went okay, not great not disastrous: the second slightly worse as she ran out of time maybe leaving as many as 30% of the questions. She’s sick before and during her second exam (Chemistry). We head to the doctors to get a sick note that basically says nothing but records the fact she’s vomited her way through an exam and symptoms have now cleared.

The day before the third exam day (two in one, a resit of Mechanics and Further Pure Maths) the meltdown arrived.

“I feel like killing myself”

Please let me skip the further maths exam”

“After that last exam I thought seriously about throwing myself under a bus”

“I can just resit them all next year”

“It’s like when I was having really dark thoughts, and feeling really sad. When I thought about ending it all by drinking bleach”

“I’m going to fail so why bother. I might as well just not sit that exam and resit next Summer”

It was essentially a pained and painful litany of “I’m going to get a U. I’m fucked & let’s talk about the last time I got depressed and tried to kill myself (news to me). And yet bizarrely she was also saying it’s not about the exams per se, just the fact that she’s badly prepared for them. As if that wasn’t true of every person sitting an exam.

So all very intense and dark.

And I found myself having two quite different conversations: Yes, there is the possibility of re-sitting exams if necessary. There is also the possibility of going through university clearing to find a course that takes lower grades than the ones she’s currently listed on UCAS (minimum AAA).

But fundamentally being poorly prepared for an exam is her responsibility (possibly her outrageously expensive school’s responsibility also who have predicted A*A*AA). And if sitting exams makes her this miserable, maybe she needs to think twice about going to university which will be full of exams, especially for a degree like engineering. So maybe she should think about a different route, say an apprenticeship, which will take a lot longer, probably be less stressful, but could take her to an engineering qualification (HND or better) with a decent company.

& maybe she needs to get over herself a little bit because there are plenty of kids out there who don’t get three A levels at high grades. One of her friends from primary school is only sitting two A levels, will take some time for travel but then basically try to find a job and make her own way in the world. None of this makes her worth less, none of it makes her stupid or uninteresting. She just isn’t academic and suited to exams.

And then I called a therapist.

Because it’s scary when your child is this unhappy. Her father tells me that all teenagers have dark thoughts, and that the openess about mental health issues in our social group has given kids a language to use that is almost more scary than bottling it all up.

I’m not convinced.

So she goes off to her exam and I decide to collect her from school – suddenly it feels unsafe to have her coming home alone.

And she tells me that she’s glad she went and sat the exams, that the mechanics re-sit went well. Whilst the Further Pure Maths Exam was a disaster (she reckons she may have got around 40%) it was better than zero so worthwhile working through it. And I suppose the truth is that it’s never as bad as you expect, and even if it is bad, it eventually ends and we get to move forwards.

Trite but true.

And my baby worked consistently for her next exam, Physics, which again she ran out of time to complete.

And we talked to the therapist who doesn’t have space for my girl but maybe could recommend. She’s happy to offer her dad and I an appointment (not sure what that achieves) but she seems to feel that if we have the situation contained then we’re good but then maybe we need some help. how do we know if we have the situation contained? She said she’d thought of drinking bleach – how can that ever be contained FFS.

And we talked to her school who will sit down with us all once all the exams are out of the way. They’ll talk us through the process for clearing and be sure to have someone available when we come for our results. They’ll talk to us about re-sits which they don’t do at the school but can recommend colleges where either you just sit the exams in the Summer, or one which involves actual tuition.

And we looked up available apprenticeships, and it turns out there’s one not a million miles away with a reputable company but it requires an application to be filed mid-month. Maybe we should make the application and see ho the cards fall.

Really it all depends on what she thinks has gone wrong and whether it’s something that a re-sit would address.

Meanwhile the therapist has asked whether we think our doctor needs to be informed.

 

 

Life Changes

Menopause is shit.

There is no other way of describing the experience of peri-menopause (menopause is the end point technically, the day 2 years after your last period)

Put three women together of a certain age, especially friends who know each other well, and the conversation quickly turned to symptoms. & they’re surprisingly varied with very little proven to mitigate those symptoms.

At menopause the hormonal balance in a woman’s body changes.

A quick web search highlights the variety of responses:

Perimenopause can last anywhere from one to 10 years. During this time, the ovaries function erratically and hormonal fluctuations may bring about a range of changes, including hot flashes, night sweats, sleep disturbances, and heavy menstrual bleeding. Other signs of perimenopause can include memory changes, urinary changes, vaginal changes, and shifts in sexual desire and satisfaction.

Some women breeze through the transition. For many others, the hormonal changes create a range of mild discomforts. And for about 20 percent of women, the hormones fluctuate wildly and unpredictably, and spiking and falling estrogen and declining progesterone cause one or more years of nausea, migraines, weight gain, sore breasts, severe night sweats, and/or sleep trouble. For this group, perimenopause can be enormously disruptive both physically and emotionally.

So one of my friends looks to be breezing through the entire process. She reports less frequent periods (now almost non existent) and the occasional hot sweat at night that involves pushing off the quilt and going back to sleep. A bit of digging reveals that she actually struggles to get back to sleep (she’s the stoic friend) but still it seems a relatively straightforward process.

Another has a different story to tell. She is currently engaged in a whole series of tests to make sure that her symptoms are “normal” menopausal responses as opposed to something much more serious,  but both her and her doctor are convinced menopause is the answer. A quick run through of her symptoms include:

  • night sweats making it difficult to impossible for her to sleep
  • night panics or terrors, causing her to wake and again disrupting sleep
  • permanent skin discolouration around her face needing quite heavy make-up
  • shooting pains up and down her left leg sometimes accompanied by numbness to the touch

Since she’s holding down a full-time heavy duty job, plus raising a 12 year old child, the timing is poor and she’s considering HRT to delay menopause for upto 10 years.

And then there’s me with my occasional night sweats (thankfully not enough to disrupt sleep seriously) and menopausal flooding, which is the devil’s own work. Plus stiff joints and a slight numbness just below my pelvic bone on the left (apparently these are menopausal symptoms, whereas previously I’d just classified them as age).

When oestrogen is lower, the uterine lining gets thinner, causing the flow to be lighter or to last fewer days. And when oestrogen is high in relation to progesterone (sometimes connected with irregular ovulation), bleeding can be heavier and periods may last longer.

In reality this translates as an erratic blood flow that can occasionally and unpredictable generate enough pressure to push out a tampon. Flooding is an apt description of what happens. So no matter how heavy a tampon and thick a sanitary pad, I can be forced to run to the toilet at a second’s notice which obviously makes everyday life a bit limited. There is no way I could “safely” sit through a theatre performance during my period. I cannot be more than a minute away from a functioning and available loo.

And it is the sheer bloodiness that annoys even more than the cramps and pain that often accompany them. Dealing with the consequences in the loo at a bridge club, I suddenly realised I needed to take extraordinary care with my incredibly bloody hand (to the elbow) to avoid marking my white top. Even so I ended up walking back in with some marks on my (thankfully dark) skirt.

And apart from HRT there seems little available that has been proven to alleviate symptoms.

On line advice highlights the frankly useless:

Perimenopause can sometimes be managed through self-help approaches such as meditation, yoga, relaxation, regular exercise, healthful food, enough sleep, and support from family and friends.

Now call me a feminist, but if men were subject to intense random pain, plus blood shooting out of their arse uncontrollably on a monthly basis, I don’t think they’d be left with “self help approaches”.

About 25% of women have heavy bleeding (sometimes called hypermenorrhea, menorrhagia, or flooding) during perimenopause.

Some women’s menstrual flow during perimenopause, like mine,  is so heavy that even supersized tampons or pads cannot contain it. If you are repeatedly bleeding heavily, you may become anaemic from blood loss. During a heavy flow you may feel faint when sitting or standing. This means your blood volume is decreased; try drinking salty liquids such as tomato or V8 juice or soup. Taking an over-the-counter NSAID such as ibuprofen every four to six hours during heavy flow will decrease the period blood loss by 25 to 45 percent.

But in the spirit of co-operation, this is where my friends have ended up:

Best friend with no symptoms – woo hoo, we’re all jealous as hell but still talking. Thankfully she has other problems or would be unbearable.

Best friend with symptoms – taking flax supplements to help with the night sweats and anxiety attacks in the night. Seriously considering HRT. I’ve passed on a recommendation from another friend for evening primrose oil.

Me: Currently taking iron tablets to limit any anaemia from the flooding and have just started taking the supplement agnus castus which is supposed to help raise progesterone levels very slightly, but takes a couple of cycles to be useful.  I’ve started to make myself drink much more liquids, and will be ordering more tomato juice. And given the increased pain levels, I’ve been taking ibuprofen more regularly during periods.

Second Thoughts

I was going to title this post “Confessions of a NL Housewife” and decided that the resultant commentary was the last thing I needed to deal with whilst debating the relative merits of upgrading my site security and doing beggar all. Maybe substituting dithering for confessions would be more accurate anyway.

I love cooking, but never follow a recipe book. It’s not quite a confession. It could actually be a bit of a humble brag, except I always start out thinking I’ll follow the recipe and obviously love recipes and recipe books. I have tons of the things on my shelves and my own dedicated recipe box on the NYTimes site (really recommend the latter for anyone who hates losing recipes on-line).

In fact I’m always really disappointed to realise I can’t follow the recipe, inevitably because something is missing. Even if I have bought the ingredients carefully and comprehensively on-line, by the time I get around to it either a key spice has lost itself at the back of the cupboard or the kids (or man) have eaten the new fruit or vegetable “just to see what it was like”

And in part the problem is timeliness. I start out ordering the ingredients early in the week but the food is delivered on a Friday, which means cooking on a weekend or alternatively, eating out or cooking something simple because life is too busy, so it’s almost always a week or three after the ingredients are bought and delivered that I finally get around to cooking.

Which also means sometimes things are just past their best so an alternative is called for.

I’m a pretty rubbish gardener as well, despite loving the whole idea of a garden and certainly the sitting out in the shade. So I’ll order my bulbs, my tulips and alliums, and then when they arrive six months later have totally forgotten what to do with them. There is a plan, but who knows what it once was.

And sometimes this ends up with a surprise success. Having bought white/purple pansies last Autumn that failed entirely to appear all Winter-Spring but suddenly showed their faces in time for the Summer and have totally made work a white-purple-pink colour scheme, so well that I might just try to stick with it for the next forever.

But it also means that plants sometimes turn up and although I’m almost certain that I’ve planted them, I have no idea what they are. I am almost certain that the triffid like creatures popping up at the end of the pink rose bed are actually huge foxtail lilies that I planted a year or so ago. They never really turned up for the party after planting. Maybe the garden was too wet (or more likely too dry) that year and maybe the squirrels moved them about a bit (beggars).

But when I can bring myself to stick to a plan, which usually means the plan isn’t too long term, then I still am stuck waiting. because gardens almost always take a couple of years or ten, to settle into their skin. Whilst some of my plants like the perennial wallflowers singularly fail to die off in their allotted time (2 years or so) others such as the rose and underplanted salvia will take three to four years before showing signs of maturity.

Patience is a gardening asset that I may never own.

Yet I still love the garden and pottering around in it doing the nicer bits (no one likes cutting hedges except very inadequate men – and yes I do know it’s a gross stereotype but it’s held true for me). So when my 83 year old friend suggests I should open the thing for charity on one of those afternoon sessions, I’m tempted.

Then she poor water on my enthusiasm by pointing out that everyone who visits is incredibly critical. Your edges must be trim and there must be a total lack of weeds: my garden never saw a trim edge or the back of campion and dandelions so perhaps it’s a non-starter. Alternatively I could just title it “Dry as a bone, lazy garden” and be up front about my limitations.

Since the conversation was somewhat downed by a comment along the lines of “But I probably won’t live to see it” from my very sprightly 83 year old friend, we lost a bit of momentum there: I’m not ready for my best mates to die of old age. No one said this intergenerational thing would be easy, but surely their part of the deal is to live forever?

Maybe it could become a project. We both love a good project and as a minimum it would involve sitting in the garden quite a lot with her giving excellent advice on how to get rid of weeds and sharpen my border edges. If she’s really unlucky, I might even serve her some lunch with one of my new recipes.

Security

Now the world is more aware of what can go wrong when we give our on-line data to strangers on the web, when it’s all basically gone wrong for some people (quite a lot of people) the web searchers and browsers have decided to implement some changes.

As a result, a new widget appears even on a baby diary site like this one, saying that I use cookies and is that okay with you?

Because it’s a tiny site with an inexpensive shared host, then it isn’t eligible for certification, not that I actually hold anyones’ data anyway – don’t ask for it and don’t store it – because basically I’m not selling or buying anything from anyone.

But I don’t especially like getting a warning flash up overtime I decide to update my everyday rants and rambles with a “website not secure” warning.  Maybe just to get rid of it, I’ll upgrade to independent hosting which will cost me more, and get a security certificate, which will cost me considerably more, just to get rid of that annoying warning.

Hmm.

Not buying. Not selling. Really not collecting any data on anyone, anywhere. Yet still I’m seeing that annoying warning.

& in real life, though I’ve checked my Facebook data (minimal because I’m a chronic under-sharer with paranoid tendencies) whenever I log onto a new site or search engine and they ask me whether I’m okay with their data policy, I rarely scroll though it to decide.

I do turn off most things on search engines, but mainly because I find tailored advertising spooky and intrusive. I don’t want an algorithm predicting my interests even though I know somewhere out there will be a box I have forgotten to tick that means an algorithm has caught me somewhere.

Does anyone actually pay attention to the warnings? Does anyone exercise more control just because now you have to tick a box that says yes instead of no. I’m not convinced.

 

Grenville

In the UK no one ever talks about how much they earn: it is considered incredibly rude to ask and incredibly vulgar to share. So a strange proxy has developed, where instead we talk about our houses, where we live and how much our neighbours’ house cost them. It allows everyone to establish relative wealth without talking about earnings.

More than other countries, the idea of wealth and financial well-being in the UK is predicated on owning a house yet the government now seems chronically unable to develop a policy that would allow most adults to buy their own property in the future.

My generation caught the tail-end of the housing price boom so to a certain extent we are now sitting on a huge pile of entirely unearned wealth. We cannot sell our house since we need somewhere to live, so the cash value of our property is likely to remain untapped until we die.

The average age of beneficiaries in the Uk is 61, so my kids will not inherit this wealth (which will be taxed in the UK, albeit only amounts about £1m) until they are long past raising their own families. So my children, unless we dig deep into our pockets to help them buy (and most parents are obviously not wealthy enough to do this out of income and/or savings) will rent property.

Given that rental property is a feature of an entire generations live and expectations, the UK needs to have a decent policy towards rental housing, which includes social housing.

With the burnt out Grenville Tower still standing over central London, and the personal testimonies of loss being heard in the investigation, the LSE Housing and Communities, in partnership with the National Communities Resource Centre at Trafford Hall, have published what they consider to be the ten most important lessons to be learned:

Lesson 1: There should be a single point of control for any multi-storey block so that everyone knows, whether it is staff, residents or emergency services, where to go and who is responsible whenever an emergency arises.

Lesson 2: A full record of work that has been done must be kept, including the costs, the rationale, the specifications and implementation, with a continuous sequence of recorded information from start to finish, handed over on completion to the responsible owner/manager.

Lesson 3: There should be the equivalent of an MOT test for all multi-storey, high-rise and tower blocks as they have complex and linked internal systems, involving the interaction of many different technical features including plumbing, electrical wiring, heating, lift maintenance, roofs, windows, walls, fire doors, fire inhabitors, and means of escape.

Lesson 4: The containment of fire within each individual flat (commonly known as compartmentation) is absolutely crucial. A breach in the party or external walls of flats, often caused by installing television wiring, gas piping, electric wiring, plumbing or other works, creates a conduit for fire.

Lesson 5: In-depth fire inspections should happen every year in every block, using qualified inspectors, checking walls, doors, equipment, cupboards, shelves, etc. to ensure there are no breaches of fire safety or containment.

Lesson 6: Knowing who lives in all the flats within a block, including leasehold properties, private lettings, and subletting with the right to enter, inspect and enforce where there is a potential hazard affecting the block, is essential to exercising control over conditions and safety. Leasehold agreements should specify the obligation to provide access keys in case of leaks, fire, or breaches of containment.

Lesson 7: On-site management and supervision maintains basic conditions and is essential for security. The landlord can then enforce a basic standard, both in the stairwells and within units. The proximity of neighbours makes enforcement of tenancy conditions vital.

Lesson 8: The maintenance of multi-storey blocks is an engineering challenge where precision and quality control are essential. Judith Hackitt’s Interim Review of Building Regulations recommends higher standards, stronger enforcement, and far greater professionalism in designing, delivering, and running complex multi-storey buildings.

Lesson 9: There should be no shortcutting on cost and quality as short term savings can lead of long-term costs, as Grenfell Tower shows.

Lesson 10: Tenants are entitled to have a voice in the safety, maintenance, and general condition of their blocks. They often know more than staff about who lives in blocks and about earlier works as they have often been around longer than housing staff. They know what changes have been made. They are valuable conduits for vital information, and can thus help their landlords and their community.

Borders

It is beyond infuriating to read people suggesting that Ireland is an EU problem, and that the UK need not put up a border at all.

We are more than 18 months along in this process, leaving in March next year, and the UK government has still not established what it wants to happen as a result of brexit. In particular the UK has still not worked out how to reconcile the UK commitments:

  • to leaving the EU,
  • leaving the single market,
  • leaving the customs union; and yet,
  • still maintaining no border within Ireland whilst also not setting up a border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

None of this is new. None of this is rocket science and none of this is particularly contentious. It is not possible to square this circle: the only reason that the Labour Party has agreed membership of a customs union as policy.

FactCheck spoke to Aoife O’Donoghue, Professor of Law at the University of Durham to understand the issue.

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-what-are-the-options-for-the-irish-border-after-brexit

She explained that the no-border option is off the table: “that’s gone. If the UK had chosen to stay in the customs union and the single market, you could do that. But in deciding not to, that means there has to be some form of border.”

Given the conditions imposed by the UK government, some form of border control between Ireland and the UK is inevitable.

Because let’s be very clear, there is no technological solution currently available that would remove the need for border controls and border inspections in Ireland. The most automated, technological advanced border in the world between Sweden (EU) and Norway (single market but not customs union) the average stop for each lorry is 20 minutes. They deal with significantly less traffic than we see from Ireland.

The UK government itself has already rejected the most up to date comprehensive technological solution (SMART2.0) presented to the Eu as inadequate and unsuitable for Ireland.

And aside from trade tariffs, once we are outside of the EU and not committed to following all of the same rules, regulations and standards, then we will have to see manual stops, inspections and certification of livestock at the border, if only for basic health and safety and disease prevention.

Which also explains why those people bleeding on about the Common Travel Area (CTA) between the UK and Ireland have entirely missed the point. The CTA pre-dates membership of the EU by both the UK and Ireland. It required regulatory alignment between the UK and Ireland to allow free movement between the two islands. It was effectively replaced by membership of the EU, which ensured the same thing and also allowed free movement across the broader membership countries.

When we leave, Ireland will remain in the EU and will change its rules, standards and regulations in line with the EU. The only way to maintain a CTA would be for the UK to also agree to change all of its rules, standards and regulations in line with the EU, despite being outside of the EU, and obviously with no say on how those rules, standards and regulations were decided.

& the harder the brexit, the harder the border between the UK and Ireland will have to be, where the very extreme end of the spectrum is a hard border where the UK leaves with no deal and has to default to World Trade Organisation rules.

If the UK defaults to WTO rules (using copied-and-pasted versions of the EU’s tariffs in the short term), the EU would still have to maintain its side of the border. That would require check goods coming into Ireland from the UK. That’s because the EU’s existence as a free trade area depends on its ability to demonstrate to the WTO that it can control its external borders properly.

In theory, the UK could decide not to impose checks on goods moving the other way (i.e. from the Republic into Northern Ireland). This could make a hard border slightly softer though of course basic checks on livestock etc would be required from a health and safety, disease prevention perspective.

But there’s a catch: under WTO rules, unless you’re in a free trade bloc like the EU or NAFTA, you have to obey the “most favoured nation” rule.

That means if you lower trade tariffs for one trading partner, you have to lower tariffs to all your other partners. Professor O’Donoghue explains:

“If the UK chooses not impose any tariffs on goods coming across the [Irish] border… that would mean that the UK is giving the EU (because Ireland is the EU in this context) complete open access. So its most favoured nation tariff is zero. That means it would have to give a zero tariff access to every single country in the WTO.”

Abolishing import tariffs unilaterally would have a seriously damaging impact on UK manufacturing and agriculture.

So then we are faced with the option of a hard border between N Ireland and the rest of the UK which is likely to be very difficult politically. We currently have a minority government propped up by the support of N Ireland’s DUP. It is inconceivable that they would vote for any kind of “special status” viewing it as a step towards a reunited Ireland. Some MP’s may well think that perhaps we should just sacrifice the six counties of N Ireland entirely, but again, with a minority government they simply don’t have the votes to force the required referendum in N Ireland.

& then there is the sad truth that whilst the DUP may fight tooth and nail to avoid “special status” other devolved governments such as Scotland might well argue that they would like to be part of the N ireland “special status” having voted convincingly to remain within the EU.

And at stake is our trade relationship with Ireland, one of the very few countries that we run a trade surplus with (around £6bn)  in both trade in goods and services.

Round and round we go: where we stop nobody knows.