No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

An old TV aerial post on our chimney stack was moving quite a bit in the recent high winds. As the stack passes through our bedroom, it was noisy enough to keep my wife awake, and disturb me a fair bit. It was one of those things that I had been aware of for a while - but it got worse over last weekend.

On Monday I looked up local aerial companies and chose one who said he could come that day and fix it. His price seemed reasonable, so I booked him in. He arrived about two hours later and proceeded to take the aerial post down. All well and good. As I went to see how he was doing as he packed up he said that his hat had blown off in the wind (it was windy, and cold - trying to snow), and was on next doors roof. We had a look, and could see the hat.

I said that I had a long pole in the garage and would fetch it. Going to the garage I spotted the pole behind some furniture that we have stored there (another story), and reached for it - as I did this, I dislodged a spade which had been hanging on a nail in the wall. The spade fell heavily, and I moved it out of the way to reach the pole. We managed to get the hat, I paid the guy, all was well.

Today (Thursday) I was in the garage looking for something else when I noticed that a battery charger which I had charging a battery had no lights. I followed the extension lead into which it was plugged back to the wall socket. What I found was that the lead had been neatly chopped in two by the spade as it fell a few days before. Turning off the socket I removed the plug and rescued the lead - it came completely apart in may hand.

I worked out that if I fitted a new plug, the lead would still be long enough to serve the purpose for which I had been using it. Long story short - it took me another 20 minutes to find a plug and fit it, test the lead and refit it into it's place in the garage. The old plug was really old - so much so that it wasn't a safety plug and still had solid metal live and neutral pins - so I didn't want to use it again. As nearly all new appliances have moulded plugs I ended up cannibalising another, shorter, extension lead. 

The battery charger doesn't seem to work any more now. I can only assume that something else blew - but that bears further investigation. The RCD for the garage didn't blow in the main fusebox when the lead got chopped - which is a good thing because our freezer wouldn't like it much if it did.

If I hadn't tried to help the guy get his hat back.............

Succeeded by a Lamp post

Every now and then, usually when walking or driving along a road I find myself thinking that everything around me will still be there when I am dead and gone. I realise that this is morbid - but it's true nonetheless.

Not everything will still be there - but the lamp posts stand a fair chance of surviving me. I know it's odd, but true. I realise that I am lucky to live where I do, in this time and not another part of the world or another time period where life could tend to be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' as Thomas Hobbes would have it. Realising this in itself makes me wonder why people like me don't take better care of themselves but often try to, for example, drink themselves to obscurity or even death.

Listening to the radio recently I heard a comment that winners of money in games shows sometimes express the need to improve their bodies by spending some of their winnings on body augmentation or plastic surgery as important. I know that if for some reason I suddenly became wealthy I would invest in getting my dodgy knees and hip looked at - but I don't consider that vanity - more like pain relief. Question is then, why don't I do this now? Perhaps I don't have faith in the National Health Service?