My mother-in-law packed her bags and moved back to Germany this week. She had been living in Britain for nearly 20 years but really needed a flat on a single level rather than our old terrace house with its tight staircase. I think it would have suited us for her to move to a flat locally but the uncertainty surrounding Brexit has left her feeling unwelcome for some time. Maybe if Scotland had become independent she would have stayed but as it is she wanted to jump whilst she could still make the journey back. I suppose she has experience with this after experiencing the inhumanity of both the Nazis and Stasi (which she maintains consisted of exactly the same personnel) and she has a fairly good idea of how badly things turn out when a bunch of extremists are left in charge. Catching a ferry from Newcastle is somewhat more dignified than having to jump a fence in Berlin.
The upshot of all this is that we now need to clear out her house and sell it on. She took quite a bit of furniture and belongings with her but there are still a lots of things that I need to find a home for. In terms of the furniture, my first thought was to contact a few local charities. The British Heart Foundation have taken quite a few items, mostly shelving units and a glass TV unit. I was hoping that they would take the sofa but they thought it was too stained. I cleaned this up with carpet cleaner and it looked brand new so I phoned the Salvation Army but they only take suites. As it is, I managed to spill oil all over our (rather tatty) sofa at home so I’m taking this myself. If nothing else it is whippet coloured so shouldn’t show up any dog hair. The one other item was a single bed which someone from Freegle has taken.
Aside from the furniture she also left lots of books – almost all German language ones. For the most part these are in very good condition but there is a limited market for German books in the UK. Some of the German “classics” were taken by our local library who were quite happy to restock their foreign language section but many of them are just novels and biographies. Raymond has expressed some interest in them. I am planning to go through the boxes with him and anything that he isn’t interested in can go on Ebay. Even if I only cover the postage costs with them I will at least know that the books are going to a good home.
The rest of the house clearance is actually much more familiar to me. Over the years we have used her loft space as an additional storage area. Having removed the boxes I now have a house full of my hoardings. I will have to decide what to do with an electric bass guitar, a 1980’s Japanese Heavy Metal guitar an acoustic guitar that I have no recollection of and an early 1990’s Roland Synthesiser. To be honest, I rather fancy keeping some of these, providing I can find somewhere sensible to store them, but one of the other things to deal with is a rather large collection of old vinyl records.
A few years ago it was almost impossible to give away vinyl but now it is increasingly becoming a major force in music with the vinyl release often being the big money spinner – especially for older acts. I’ve never thrown out a vinyl record; I do have an emotional attachment to them as I can often recall where and when I bought them but I much prefer the clean sound quality of CDs and I have replaced many of my old LPs with their remastered CD equivalents. If I haven’t, more often than not it is because I’m not that bothered with the record itself. However, like Helga with her books, I would rather that they found a good home rather than being flung out en masse. My thinking is that I will sell those on Ebay that I either have on CD or haven’t bothered with for years and only keep those that are irreplaceable or that I have a particular emotional attachment to.
The only thing with all this Ebay selling is that I am going to have to research the peculiarities of book and record grading. To me it is the content that is important but I’ve noticed that collectors can be right picky sods.
Friday 19 January 2018
Friday 5 January 2018
Box Set Madness
Watching live TV is rapidly becoming something of an oddity. Aside from obviously “live” events such as sport or reality contests it is now very common for shows to be watched on a PVR or, increasingly, via steaming and catch up services. The BBC’s iPlayer was very much at the forefront of this as a catch-up service but although it was very much a disruptive technology in its own right it is now playing catch-up itself. Channel 4 operates its own service, All 4, and aside from catch-up it also offers access to its extensive back-catalogue with “box-sets” of old shows available on demand – many going back to the 1980s.
Over the Christmas period, the BBC offered its own box-sets for a limited period. I ended up watching Peaky Blinders, a show that I had heard many good things about but hadn’t watched since I had missed the first series. Over the last couple of weeks I have watched all 24 episodes and I am really glad that I did. It’s essentially a gangster series set in Birmingham in the post-World War One period but unlike many similar programmes it has far more of the personal and social background of the period – particularly in terms of how damaged many returning from the trenches in France really were. In that respect it reminded me more of something like the Godfather films which put the greed and brutality of the characters in the context of the poverty from which they were escaping.
It’s definitely a plus point for the BBC making this available but with it only being on the iPlayer for a month I have really had to binge watch it to make sure I didn’t miss any episodes. However, with Channel 4’s All 4 service I would have been able to delve in and out of the series at leisure. The main difference between iPlayer and All 4 is that the Channel 4 service carries adverts whereas the BBC doesn’t. I can actually live with this on All 4 as they are offering a decent service free-to-view but it does make me wonder whether the BBC are missing a trick.
The iPlayer typically has around 3 Billion hits per year. I don’t know what Channel 4 charges but a typical YouTube single advert costs about 15p. A similar charge for the BBC would mean showing a single advert before a programme could result in an extra £450 million per year – and that is purely for the catch-up service. If box sets and archive programming were available in a similar manner to All 4 that could be considerably higher. Of course, the BBC is tied down by its charter not to show adverts but just a small change could potentially bring in a huge amount of revenue whilst still allowing free-to-air programming and increasing its independence from the UK government.
Of course if it did start putting up old series there are quite a few I’d love to see again: Sci Fi like Blake’s 7 and The Triffids; comedies like The Goodies and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em; documentaries such as Civilisation, Life on Earth or The Ascent of Man; some old Play for Today or Our Friends in the North wouldn’t go amiss. I do wonder how many of these fondly remembered programmes would stand up to the test of time but there is only really one way to find out. How about it BBC?
Over the Christmas period, the BBC offered its own box-sets for a limited period. I ended up watching Peaky Blinders, a show that I had heard many good things about but hadn’t watched since I had missed the first series. Over the last couple of weeks I have watched all 24 episodes and I am really glad that I did. It’s essentially a gangster series set in Birmingham in the post-World War One period but unlike many similar programmes it has far more of the personal and social background of the period – particularly in terms of how damaged many returning from the trenches in France really were. In that respect it reminded me more of something like the Godfather films which put the greed and brutality of the characters in the context of the poverty from which they were escaping.
It’s definitely a plus point for the BBC making this available but with it only being on the iPlayer for a month I have really had to binge watch it to make sure I didn’t miss any episodes. However, with Channel 4’s All 4 service I would have been able to delve in and out of the series at leisure. The main difference between iPlayer and All 4 is that the Channel 4 service carries adverts whereas the BBC doesn’t. I can actually live with this on All 4 as they are offering a decent service free-to-view but it does make me wonder whether the BBC are missing a trick.
The iPlayer typically has around 3 Billion hits per year. I don’t know what Channel 4 charges but a typical YouTube single advert costs about 15p. A similar charge for the BBC would mean showing a single advert before a programme could result in an extra £450 million per year – and that is purely for the catch-up service. If box sets and archive programming were available in a similar manner to All 4 that could be considerably higher. Of course, the BBC is tied down by its charter not to show adverts but just a small change could potentially bring in a huge amount of revenue whilst still allowing free-to-air programming and increasing its independence from the UK government.
Of course if it did start putting up old series there are quite a few I’d love to see again: Sci Fi like Blake’s 7 and The Triffids; comedies like The Goodies and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em; documentaries such as Civilisation, Life on Earth or The Ascent of Man; some old Play for Today or Our Friends in the North wouldn’t go amiss. I do wonder how many of these fondly remembered programmes would stand up to the test of time but there is only really one way to find out. How about it BBC?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
