A hard rain's going to fall

It has been raining hard for the last few days and that always brings a trickle of phone calls. Blocked gutters, drains backing up leaking roofs. I got a call at 8.30 on Sunday morning from an old fella who has an ongoing problem with a leaking lead roof.

He is the neighbour of a friend and originally he tried to say it was my friend's broken tiles that were causing his problem. It is in fact a box gutter that sits entirely over his property but takes rain from my friend's roof. It was ridiculous to suggest it was broken tiles because my friend didn't have any broken tiles and even if he had, there was no way that they were causing this lead roof to leak.

What I discovered, from a close examination two years ago, was a hairline crack in the lead. The roof should have been laid in sections or bays to accommodate expansion but the builder hadn't bothered and had put it in using a single sheet. It must have taken a crane to get it up there. I told the old fella that it should really all be stripped out and relaid properly with expansion breaks and drips. He clearly knew this from previous problems but he also knew that it would cost thousands. I proposed giving it three coats of acrylic sealer or better still using a single membrane straight over the lead. There are now a lot very durable products such as Plygene from H D Sharman in Yorkshire (www.hdsharman.co.uk) that are being used to solve just this sort of problem.
"That sounds like a cowboy solution" The old fella said.
I told him it was anything but. The newly refurbished, magnificent barrel vaulted roof over St Pancras has gutters lined with Plygene and they don't expect to be touching them for at least the next fifty years. They may even last a hundred.
Given that this bloke is 75 years old I call that a medium to long term solution. In the end I sent him a written quotation for £150.00 for the 3 coats of acrylic option because it is the cheapest and easiest. I told him that I thought it would give him ten years.
He hit the roof, not literally but I got a letter back calling me a criminal and accusing me of damaging his roof when I went up to look at the problem. I had never intended to make any money out of it let alone rip him off. The materials would come to £35.00 and it would take a day. It was also a round trip of a 180 miles so it would have to work in with a visit to my friend. I didn't reply.

I have never minded people not accepting my quotes, they don't have to avoid me in the street if they decide to go with someone cheaper. If they can get a cheaper job and they are happy with it then good luck to them. It is business, you can shop where you like. My suits come from Marks and Spencers not Saville Row but I don't begrudge Saville Row tailors their place in the market. I certainly don't send them insulting letters calling them rip-off merchants. Having said that I also understand that £150 is a lot of money to many pensioners, it is a lot of money to me if I am paying it out, but strangely just chicken feed when it comes in.

All that was 2 years ago and he has been up there regularly with some bitumen and a brush which seems to last about 6 months. In between his bodged repairs he has had a bucket catching the drips. It is only in the really heavy rain that he has to get up in the middle of the night to empty the bucket and without knowing his personal habits I would bet he is getting up once or twice anyway. Still I don't like to think of him lying there listening to the drips.

Last summer I was feeling a bit sorry for him and told him I would fix the roof for nothing. I wanted him to see that I am not the baddie he thinks I am, but he then spoiled it all by telling me that even though I was doing it for free for him I shouldn't lose out but should charge my friend double. "Make him pay" He said with a vindictive sneer straight out of a Dickens novel. He wasn't quite getting this concept of friends.

Again I let it go hoping he would get tired of waiting and find someone else but there he was last Sunday morning on the phone. It had poured down all night and I can only imagine the conversation that he had with his wife before calling. I bet the words 'cowboy' and 'unreliable' were in it somewhere. No doubt he has had a chance to test the market and has found that my original £150.00 was not that dear. But that was before I gave him a 100% discount. Then I unwittingly put him in an impossible position. Once you have sniffed the scent of 'free' anything with a price attached has a nasty smell about it. All those MPs who are currently being brought to book for charging their household repairs to the taxpayer as 'expenses' are going to find just that when they start paying for them out of their own money.








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What are friends for (rhetorical)

A friend phoned on Sunday morning telling me that all his electrics had gone off. He had been making a bit of toast and the power went off. This is classic. The moisture in the bread shorts out the toaster. There was a time when they went bang but with RCDs being so sensitive they simply trip out. He told me that all his lights were working and he had checked the consumer board. All the little MCBs were in a row none of them down. He was baffled and starting to think about unloading his freezer and shipping it up to our house.

"What about the RCD" I asked him?

"Yes I have tried that."

"What do you mean you have tried it?"

"Well I pushed the test button."

"And what happened?"

"Nothing"

What do you mean nothing?

"Nothing."

"You mean it didn't drop the switch down?"

"The switch is already down."

"OK so push the switch up. Then go and try your sockets."

A few seconds later I heard him shout.

Blimey! It's working.

It was that simple and he felt a complete fool. I told him there was no need. We are all fools in some way. We all have blind spots. Mine is algebra.

I have often thought about what makes a person clever. We see a person making a stupid move on the road and without hesitation we call them an idiot. The only thing we really know is that they are a bad driver, or to be more accurate, at that moment they are a bad driver. It may well be that they were just thinking about algebra. It can be a killer.


My fuse box friend had a public school education and is clever in very many ways and he earns a lot more than me but when it comes to practical things he is not so good. The paint is peeling off his windows and they are rotting. His lack of investment now will cost him dear. I tell him every so often but he is oblivious. His mind is on the millions.

I have often wondered if I would swap my skill and knowledge for another person's. Would I swap with my friend and take his pay cheque and pension? The answer has to be no. Having come this far I would now hate not being able to fix things and work my way through a practical problem, it would be a bit like being partially sighted. My practical ability is part of who I am and it affects the way I see the world. If I press the clutch pedal in on the car I have a clear idea of what is happening at the other end. Then again plenty of people manage to drive perfectly well without any knowledge of what goes on beneath the bonnet.

No doubt my friend feels the same about his knowledge and his view of the world. So long as he has me, or someone like me, to call when his power goes off he is fine and I know that if I ever need to know about opera or quantum mechanics I can call him.
Actually I lied about the quantum mechanics, so it's just the opera then.