Elves In The Attic

When I changed my utilities last month I was given the option of going for a "Green" tariff. As far as I can tell, this costs a couple of hundred pounds extra for no obvious benefit to me or the environment. I saved my cash. I did this last year as well and spent the money I saved on improving my draught proofing and fixing a badly fitted French window. This will have had a direct effect on the environment by causing me to burn less fossil fuels to heat the house although my main reasons for doing this were creature comforts and unrepentant miserliness.

Now we are settled into our new house (well late Victorian but new to us) I am looking at various home improvements to make the house more comfortable. During last month's storm I made a start by carrying out emergency repairs to Jake's bedroom window which was letting hurricane force air howl through his room and causing his toys fly around like a scene out of the film Poltergeist. His toys normally do this but I put that down to Jake. The next job I wanted to do is to improve our loft insulation as I had the feeling that we were doing a very good job of warming up the birds. As this is a revoltingly messy job I decided to get someone in to do it and found a grant was available via the Scottish Government. All well so far.

When the surveyor arrived he looked in the loft and pointed out that I had, in fact, no insulation at all but that he wouldn't be able to do anything about it due to 'elf and safety legislation. Now I've heard lots of story about the mischievous elves and tabloid stories of 'Elf an Safety Gawn Mad but, even in this day and age, I have rarely heard of workmen turning down paid work on the basis of workplace legislation - charge double for safety equipment, yes, but turning down work is a rarity. It turns out that our loft does not have the minimum working height for installing loft insulation. Nevertheless, the surveyor was very helpful and pointed out that if I wanted to have crack at this myself, I could get cheap loft insulation materials via NPower.

The NPower scheme is part of the government's scheme to reduce carbon dioxide emissions via carbon trading. Essentially, NPower pay for me to insulate my loft and they get to run coal fired power stations in return. It does sound like a bit of a fix, and I suppose it is, but the end result is that I will end up burning less fuel and it is still an encouragement to power producers to make their own operations more efficient instead of having to fork out cash to the likes of me. The insulation arrived at the remarkably cheap price of £3 per roll (by comparison, the price at Wickes was about £30) and I had the joyous task of stuffing it into the loft. This is when I discovered why the insulation firm turned the work down themselves.

Firstly, I must say that Rockwool, the insulation material I was using, may have fantastic physical properties in terms of U and R factors, flame resistance and so on; but it is a really disgusting, vile and bloody minded substance to work with. NPower supplied gloves, goggles and a face mask to work with. These were pretty essential but I found the goggles simply misted up rendering them not entirely useful. I also invested in some disposable overalls. In principle these were a fantastic idea but the problem I had was that, despite being described as XL size, they weren't big enough. I think XL must refer to extra girth as I had no problem with this. Unfortunately, the problem I has is the arms and legs of the overalls didn't reach the ends of my arms and legs. XL must be extra large rather than extra long and I suppose I'm probably both - at least I can never spend a whole day in Glasgow without someone referring to me as "Big Man" usually followed by a request for sustenance.

Anyway, I climbed into the loft and this is when I discovered the wisdom of the Elves. I could just about fit in but any form of movement was a struggle. Even worse, I was finding it almost impossible to unroll the Rockwool and even when I did it was then an effort and a half to push it into place. I think at this point the claustrophobia of the whole situation cut in as I imagined myself as some sort of Welsh Miner in a cramped Victorian pit. I thought I'd sing a couple of verses of Land of My Fathers to cheer myself up. It didn't. I started to invent some new swear words and this did, in fact, help - even thought at this point my ankles and wrists were starting to itch as the full body overall's limitations were made clear to me.

As with anything as trying as this, the best bet is to stick with it and just get the job done. I did, eventually. Afterwards, I had a shower and a bath and another shower to try and clean all the accumulated loft crap off me. I did end up vaguely clean but with both wrists and ankles red raw as well as a patch on my side - which looked strangely biblical. I was going to put a picture of my handy work up but I have sealed the hatch and will not be going back up there. The loft is a bad place, we shall not speak of it again.

Insurance

I've just had a rather expensive weekend and it has got me thinking about the subject of insurance. It started on Saturday morning when the dog decided to vomit up his entire breakfast. This is not entirely unusual for dogs as they are quite adept to the casual chunder. However, what I didn't expect was what I found when I returned home, which was a miserable looking dog surrounded by several pools of sick. He clearly wasn't well and as he kept retching we phoned the local veterinary hospital for advise. This is when things start to get expensive. Just calling a vet out at the weekend costs £90 and this is before any investigations.

An X-ray of the dog showed that his stomach was massively swollen and this lead the vet to carry out an emergency operation to look for a blockage. All this soon adds up but for the dog it is lifesaving - an intestinal blockage can kill a dog within hours. As it was, the vet could not find any physical blockage but did relieve the gas build up. In all, the bill came to over £700 which is a very expensive fart. To make matters worse, the car would not start. A very nice man from the AA came along and diagnosed that my battery was Donald Ducked (or words to that effect). This lead to a quick journey down to Halfords and another wallet emptying exercise.

Both these events can be insured for. In fact, I did have an extended warrantee for the car but not for the dog. As it was, the battery isn't covered (although the AA man was) as it is regarded as a wear and tear item. As for the dog, I had looked at insurance but as soon as the word "Whippet" is typed into the breed box a bunch of exclusions and extra excesses come into the policy. Mainly, these are related to injuries as whippets are prone to breaking due to the effects of being spindly and running at 40 mph. However, in this case the insurance would have helped. At one time we had up to 3 dogs and 2 cats so it worked out cheaper to self-insure and, even for the one dog, it still works out cheaper in the long run.

Insurance is really a bet against things going wrong and, like any decent bookmaker, the insurance companies have to make sure that what they pay out in claims is less than what they receive in premiums. As such, it will always work out cheaper in the long run to self-insure (by putting money away in a savings account) rather than pay the premiums and claim when things go wrong. The two circumstances where this is not a good idea is when there is a legal obligation to insure (for example, with cars) or when the potential claim is far beyond what could be reasonably financed (for example, a house). However, I think that living things also come under this category. If my washing machine brakes down I'm not particularly bothered whether it is replaced or repaired. When it is my dog or family, I am bothered. It's tricky. For this weekends vets bill I could easily have bought a new dog but that really isn't the point. Maybe it is time to look for pet insurance but I need something that actually comprehensively covers the animal in question.

Dontopedalogy

I wouldn't describe myself as a Royalist. I wouldn't really describe myself as a Republican either. I'm happy enough with the idea of a head of state but if we were setting up the country tomorrow I don't think we have a monarchy but, given that we have one, I don't have any burning desire to change that. However, I do find the fawning that some have for the royals to be rather vomit inducing but I do have a favourite royal and he has just turned 90.

Prince Philip is a controversial character. A German aristocrat born into the Greek royal family, serving with the Royal Navy and married to the British Queen he certainly has the background but it is more for his so-called "gaffes" that he is known. Except I don't think they are gaffes so much as a very sharp sense of black humour. Sometimes he has been accused of racism, and I think that on occasion his comments have been less than well considered but, at his best, he is one of the world's natural comedians. Largely he is taking widely held stereotypes and standing them on their heads. Out of context they can sound a bit off-colour but he even created a word to describe it: dontopedalogy - The science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it. I suppose for the rest of us it's when we think "that sounded much better in my head." Anyway, here is a selection of his comments which I have gathered off the internet:

At the height of the recession in 1981 he said: Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.

Whilst a group of deaf people were standing near a band, he said to the musicians: Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf.

He asked Tom Jones after the Royal Variety Performance: What do you gargle with, pebbles?

He said to a Lockerbie man who lived in a road where 11 people had been killed by wreckage from the Pan Am jumbo jet: People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still trying to dry out Windsor Castle.

He said of Canada: We don't come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves.

And to a French Canadian: I can't understand a word they say. They slur all their words.

At a private lunch given 30 years ago he said he thought Adam Faith's singing was like bath water going down a plug hole.

In the Caribbean: You have mosquitoes. I have the Press.

About the Apollo missions: It seems to me that it's the best way of wasting money that I know of. I don't think investments on the moon pay a very high dividend.

To pupils wearing blood-red uniforms: It makes you all look like Dracula's daughters

To a woman in Kenya: You are a woman, aren't you?

To someone who suggested in 1967 that a trip to Russia might improve diplomatic relations between Great Britain and the Soviets: The bastards murdered half my family.

To a British Student in Papua New Guinea: You managed not to get eaten then?

To an Aborigine businessman: Do you still throw spears at each other?

Also in Oz when asked to stroke a koala he said: No, I might get some ghastly disease.

To a man from the Cayman Islands: Aren't most of you descended from pirates?

To the chairman of Channel 4: So YOU'RE responsible for the kind of crap Channel 4 produces.

To a wannabe astronaut: Well, you'll never fly in it, you're too fat to be an astronaut.

On the subject of air travel: If you travel as much as we do, you appreciate how much more comfortable aircraft have become. Unless you travel in something called economy class, which sounds ghastly.

To a designer with a goatee beard: Well, you didn't design your beard too well, did you? You really must try better with your beard.

... and my personal favourites:

To a Scottish driving instructor: How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test.

To a woman with a guide dog: Do you know they're now producing eating dogs for the anorexics?

To the multi-ethnic dance troupe Diversity: Are you all one family?

Oh well. Happy birthday!

Who Would Have Guessed?

Well, that seemed to go in a flash. The first half of the series of Doctor Who has been and gone - we now have to wait until the Autumn to find out what happens next. In this series Steven Moffat has really made his mark on the whole feel of the show. Not only has his intricate plotting come much more to the fore but the atmosphere is now something different: darker and menacing. It's great for arch fans like me but I do wonder if it is now out of step with the whole family tea-time telly thing. It probably is but for me it is now more fulfilling viewing even if it may alienate some of its potential audience.

NB: Spoilers ahead - if you haven't seen the episodes you might want to stop reading here...

I commented earlier about the opening two parter. There were lots of threads left hanging from that story although, as events have unfolded, there were many plot subtleties that I had missed. However, after that adrenaline rush of an episode we were treated to The Curse of the Black Spot: a pirate adventure that could sit quite happily in any of David Tennent's series. Compared to the rest of this run it was a bit of light fluff but I don't care - Amy looked fantastic in her pirate costume. The episode also featured Lily Cole in a non-speaking role. I did wonder whether having two top red-head actresses in the same place might lead to some sort of critical mass being reached but they painted Lily blue so that was avoided.


The next episode was intriguingly called The Doctor's Wife which I had been particularly looking forward to as it had been written by Neil Gaiman. This episode sees the TARDIS brought to life in the form of Idris: an attractive, if slightly bonkers, woman. This also produced one of the series best one liners when Amy asks the Doctor if he "wished really, really hard" to make the TARDIS come to life. Gaiman must be a big fan of the series as, aside from being one of the highest profile authors to write for the show, he also seems very well versed in the history of the series with many references to the very earliest black and white stories from the 1960's. However, the story was recognisably a Gaiman creation, even to the point of using the device of a woman to represent the seemingly inanimate TARDIS - he used the same trick in Stardust where the central character of Yvaine was the human incarnation of a fallen star. One item I noted in this episode is that Rory died, yet again. I've come to the conclusion that he is the equivalent of Kenny from South Park.

Onwards we travelled and back to a futuristic Earth for The Rebel Flesh two parter. This was also written by another favourite writer in Matthew Graham who wrote the brilliant Life on Mars but who also, I was surprised to discover, had previously written for Who in the form of Fear Her - possibly the most disappointing episode of the series since it's return. I needn't have worried as this two parter was pure science fiction and, for the first time that I can recall in the new series, it didn't rely on an alien monster for it's scares. This has been something I have felt that the series should have done long before and, in spite of the story being billed as a take on Frankenstein there were two other famous Sci-Fi stories: Karel Čapek's Rossum's Universal Robots, particularly for the way the Gangers are brought to life as a chemical process; and Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - more specifically the whole story could have been a prequel to the film version, Bladerunner.

This is where I think the show has departed from the family teatime telly to true Sci Fi. Although our protagonists may have been chased down corridors the main thrust of this episode was a more philosophical one: What does it mean to be human? Aside from the existentialism some of the imagery in this story was quite graphic. In fact a friend's son had nightmares following the first episode and didn't want to see the conclusion. It's a pity, although when I was his age I always regarded Doctor Who as being adult telly that I was allowed to watch. However, I can only ever remember being terrified by one episode which was The Ark in Space - one of the very first episodes produced by Philip Hinchcliffe (he who would wind up Mary Whitehouse as much as he would delight the fans). I've been re-watching some of these old episodes via LoveFilm and, whilst the cheap effects are no longer remotely scary, I can see why I would have been frightened and I can also pick up much more detail from the scripts. For those that haven't seen Ark, think of Ridley Scott's Alien - it's largely the same story.

The end of the two parter, The Almost People, was trademark Steven Moffat. Somehow, he manages to turn a story on it's head and yet it makes total sense. In fact the reveal where Amy melts and we discover that she must have been a Ganger from episode one makes even more sense when looking back at the previous episodes and this brings us nicely to A Good Man Goes to War - where we finally find out just how much Mr Moffat has been messing with our heads.

For the mid-season finale (to use an awful Americanism) we had been promised a major cliff-hanger and to finally discover who River Song actually is. Unlike the previous story this episode threw just about every alien that the costume department could muster into the mix. In fact, I think there was a bit too much going on whereas what we were really interested in is the plot - what is the nature of Amy's baby and why is it of such importance to this bunch of cosmic ne'er-do-wells. We got some big answers but there are lots of unanswered questions about the characters going right back to Matt Smith's first adventure. However the big mid-season cliff-hanger wasn't such a big surprise. Several people had suspected this one on internet fan forums and I had this suspicion myself. The fact that River Song is Amy's daughter is a much better solution than some of the other possibilities suggested as this keeps the story in line with characters that the modern audience know. It doesn't change any of the mystery about the Doctor's past and doesn't dredge up characters from the past that only the die hard (and older) fan would know about such as Susan, the Doctor's "granddaughter", Romana, his timelady assistant, or The Rani, a renegade timelady from the series 1980's low point which some individuals think should be resurrected for some completely fanwank reasoning.


The fact that the big reveal is both guessable and obvious shouldn't take away anything from Steven Moffat's writing. All the clues were there and it actually makes reasonable sense unlike some writers who will hang their twist on some previously unknown fact (Agatha Christie is a big offender here) or simply throw in a nonsensical turn of events into the fold (RTD has been tempted by this on more than one occasion). The mid-series finish feels both satisfactory and leaves me wanting to see more. The next episode is entitled, Let’s Kill Hitler, which sounds like it must do what it says on the tin - I can't imagine that it does. It's just a pity we have to wait months to see it. I think Doctor Who under Steven Moffat has now found it's audience. It's maybe not for everyone but for those that love it, it's the best thing on TV.