The Sound of One Hand Slapping

Now this wouldn’t matter if the house was tucked away in some rural idyll. Somewhere where you can hear the tweety birds rustling outside the window. Alas here, the tweety birds would get trampled underfoot but the 40 ton lorries which they didn’t hear because their ears were bleeding thanks to the incessant din of infernal combustion engines roaring past every five seconds.

If you let that sort of thing go on, your bread and butter will be cut right out from under your feet.

In my search for a solution – and a decent night’s sleep – I’ve discovered this stuff. Acoustic insulation. It’s much thicker than normal insulation, with a dense woven mat to keep the noise down.

Sound insulation is very good for radio stations, but not something that is generally considered useful in a domestic house of mid-1800 construction. Which, quite frankly, shows a remarkable lack of foresight. Hence, they didn’t put it in to start with, and as I mentioned last week, pulling the planks off the wall is a huge pain, due to the way they all lock together.

I’ve spent days trying to find a way to get the insulation into the wall, while the thunder rumbles overhead: a noise that is drowned out by the sound of the rain, and the road as it thunders beyond the old well. I did think of wandering around in a thunderstorm with a spiked copper helmet, muttering that Thor is a pillock, and could he keep the noise down, but I realised that might make the neighbours talk about the mildly eccentric Englishman next door.
Part of the problem is that the insulation is thick, spongy, and sticks on the planks as you shove it down. I’ve tried putting some wood in the dark hole (which isn’t a euphemism) as a pusher, but that doesn’t do anything as the insulation is just too spongy. And whenever I put one hand up the wall, to slap the insulation into place, the killer spiders attack. No, really they do.
And now, I’ve come up with a solution. It involves peeling the individual planks off with a chisel, sliding two pieces of cardboard into the hole (otherwise the insulation sticks on the planks) then shoving the insulation up the gap, using a broom handle to push, and a bendy piece of wire to pull, through a drill hole I can then fill in.

Cold Chisel in Chewed Magna

I have pets in the house. No, the giant bird eating spider hasn’t come back. Nor indeed have I seen Lizzie – our Blue Tongue lizard – in weeks. Seeing the amount of rain, the poor blighter has probably downed.
Instead termites are becoming the terror, as I slowly find more wood that they have chewed on.

They seem to love the blue gum that the interior weatherboards are made out of, but are careful, pernickety eaters. They nibble through the interior of the boards, leaving the outside paint pretty much untouched. I had no idea they were there until I leaned on the wall and it just folded under me. The outside weatherboards have fared better, with only intermittent nibbling. Meanwhile the frame of the building, made out of good solid Tasmanian Oak, remains untouched. At least all the tin over my head isn’t going to collapse (Note to Ed: check this).

Alas all the new pine weatherboards that were put in just 20 years ago areas hollow as a demented chocolate santa, and are only fit for firewood.

That still leaves me with the problem of how to remove the weatherboards though, because they are carefully made with a tongue and grove so that the one above slots into the space of the one below, making a very strong structure that alas, means it’s impossible to remove a board without chopping it into little bits. Which, trust me, is very tempting. The termites have done that for the ones I want to scrap, but how do I replace them?

The answer, like with hedgehogs, is very carefully.

Once again, going back to the main theme of the blog – at least it was, many moons ago – of how to do something, I’ve worked out a technique. To lever out the boards I’ve found that running a cold chisel up its tongue will help it split neatly when I get it out, and then using that chisel on one side and a huge metre long crowbar on the other to lever it out means I can get at about half the boards without them turning into matchwood.

Then, to put  in a new, replacement  weatherboard in the gaping hole, the technique involves removing about half the height of the inner wall of the groove side, and sloping it at 45 degrees. Then, taking the tongue and doing the same with that, angling it at 45 degrees. Push the top one in place, lift it up, and it makes a reassuring click, and slots into place, without any visible sign that I’ve moved it.

At least, that is the theory, but I’ve now developed a look of horror at all the walls that need work. Some of them at least are not touched by termites – all they need is a bit of insulation. For those, I’m tempted to just slap some paint around and be done with it.

Sometimes I feel like I'm swimming uphill against the grain.

In the hair tonight

Or, how to get TV reception in Australia, part 2.
I now have my “remote and rural” antenna. This huge 12 feet long bendy monster can, apparently, pick up the slightest whisper in the air and turn it into clear precise picture. What it isn’t, however, is complete.

Thankfully it was very cheap, and comes in pleasant shades of blue and orange. Cheap, because it came out of the back of a skip, and was recycled on the notice board at work. I was delighted, until I tried to get it into the car.
As always, you can lead a gift horse to water but you can't look him in the mouth.
 After about half an hour of swearing, I bent the arms in, and poked the nose through the drivers window, running over the top of my hair. I then preceded to get some very interesting looks from drivers as I went up the M2, giving everyone the impression that I was just driving in the same general direction as half a ton of aluminium, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with me.
After a fair amount of amateur blacksmithery, hammering the various arms straight again, it works a charm, and can even pick up this quaint VHF stuff, despite the coming down like gangbusters.
It will however lurk out of sight in case it scares the horses, and causes passing aircraft to be diverted. I know the sight of such a vast aerial array scares me.
Still, I can now receive the ABC, and in the ensuing celebration, the beer flowed like wine.

The revenge of the missing gardener

For the past couple of months I’ve been carefully tending a small patch of ground by the east wing door. It was obviously a gravel car park when this place was a pizza restaurant, and the quality of the ground hasn’t changed much since. Stones, rocks, small odd shaped pieces of glass that turn out to be sections of bottles from the 1820s (well, this is an old pub after all) and even some old colonial era coins. However, I’ve dug it, mulched it, raked it, and a couple of months back I had a semi pristine flowerbed.
Back in blighty if you want vivid expansive acres of wildflowers, the classic process is to sow seed trays with flower seeds and raise them from scratch, however, here’s a curious thing. You can’t buy seed trays in Australia. I must have visited every garden centre known to man, and all of them shake their head. Not in Australia... it’s so warm, you just plant your seeds straight in the ground.
So, that’s what I’ve done.
I’ve spent the best part of two months carefully tending this most delicate of gardens, watering the delicate seedlings, and raising them until, after eight weeks, some were a good six inches high. And I did have a vast array of swan River Daisies, Marigolds, Nasturtiums, Flox, and Poppies. Except when I got home this evening, the cupboard was bare. For those of us blessed with the gift of sight, it was woeful to behold. The scorched earth had little left, except that is for my remaining line of sunflowers. But that’s about it.
What could cause such devastation? Slugs? Snails? Some weird Australian aphid? Killer locusts? Nope... The phantom gardener had struck.
“What about my seedlings?” “There were none – just a few weeds” “They were wildflowers” “Exactly – just weeds. Plants in the wrong place” “I think you’ll find I was planting them in exactly the right plants – just not necessarily in the right order.”
Someone's going to hang from the yardstick for this.

The Riddle of the Sanders – Part 1

For once, a post about how to do something, that has been the cause of me quietly losing what remains of my mind.

Sanding the ceiling flat.

Which it certainly isn’t at the moment. The question is, how did the original painters get paint blobs so consistently even over the entire surface of the ceiling? And then, when it came for a repaint about – oh – 20 years ago, why did they leave the original, flaked and chipped paint there, and then paint over the surface, rather than sanding it down flat. You can see that half of the centre of the plank is chipped away, and then rapidly painted over.

And then, to complete the god-awful eyesore, the whole lot is rounded off with a couple of florescent tubes, and a switch wacked into the door-frame, the one original charming feature left?! This is, by the way, a strange and unusual Australian habit: they even have something called an architrave switch which fits into the door-jam.

So, to get the room back to some semblance of normality, I’ve been sanding down the ceiling. It’s been taking up hours of my so called life, and I now know just what it feels like to be a bottom dog.

The phrase Top Dog comes from the convict era, when logs were held in place by irons called dogs, when they were sawn into planks by hand. The chap on the top had the best job – plenty of air, good exercise – while the man on the bottom got all the sawdust in his eyes while standing in a filthy pit.

Which is just how I’m feeling at the moment: to sand down my ceiling planks, I need to stand on the top of a ladder, holding a large belt sander over my head, and watch as this constant stream lands in my eyes. Its of sawdust, mixed with lead paint.

It does however get a lovely smooth finish – which is better than a kick in the teeth by a blind horse.

The mystery of the West Flood

The Barbie had one other major advantage. It spurred me on to give the hedge a haircut. And in so doing I solved a mystery even greater than UFOs, crop circles, the MPC’s interest rate movements, and the Loch Ness monster. Well, maybe not crop circles: it’s still a mystery as to why I spent so much time creating the blighters in the first place, although I am rather proud of one I got into a book.

I digress...

For aeons now I’ve been troubled by a switch marked West Flood. It must have had some major significance to the original native inhabitants back in the olden days (say, ten years back, which in Australian architectural terms is pretty much antediluvian). Indeed, they chiselled ancient runes on the switch plate cover to mark this switch which was in prime position, right in the middle and half way up a wall, so you couldn’t miss it. Indeed, it’s so annoying, it’s rather like the goat in the room.

It is a right pain though – I mean, why put it there? And more crucially to me, why chop out the centre section of weatherboarding to punch through the cables and the switch. To repair these, and restore the walls to their former pre-flood glory (or pre-diluvian  period – meaning "before the deluge"... see what I’ve done there?) I need to take out the entire plank. Which is also easier said than done, because of course, they are tongue and groove weatherboards, and they neatly slot together. To take out one in the middle, you either saw it out, or start at the top, and take everything off.

And of course that doesn’t solve the burning, searing question. What is the purpose of the West Flood? And why isn’t it searing... indeed, why is it very definitely not on, working, or, indeed, visible.

I’ve traced the cable, which is buried under layers of insulation in the loft, and then it runs straight down the wall into the well... from where all was a mystery, until, while working on this, I had an inspiration... and went back to where I’ve hacked down 20 years worth of growth in the shrubbery. And there, lying dormant rather like an out of work adolescent hedgehog, under piles of privet, is my West Flood.

Of course the thing doesn’t actually work or anything, and its rusted solid. But it’s good to have solved one mystery.

Eat, Spray, Love

It’s the morning after house warming day. And rather in the way of a violent thunderstorm, the Barbeque has been and gone. And indeed, that’s exactly what we had the moment our guests arrived. What they didn’t see were the manic preparations beforehand, in the aim for an animal free home, and for something to eat with.

Firstly, a pun. What do you call something with four legs that goes woof? A Barbeque. I reassembled the massive five burner Aldi-Special-offer that has been in boxes for – my! –weeks since moving day. Plugged in the gas bottle, hit the auto-start, hit it again, and on the third time of asking there was a “whump” sound rather like a Qantas engine in mid-flight, and a six foot long sheet of flame toasted any pests within arm-length. Who would imagine that burners can come unplugged? Once I’d finished beating out the smouldering shrubbery and put my eyebrows back in order, I staggered back inside. “It’s all fine love.” Not wishing to alarm “Ready, steady, lets cook”.

“Great, can you wipe down all the spiders webs from the window?

I looked through 150 years of murk at the grimy piece of glass that purports to be a kitchen window, and the ten black widows lurking by the catch. The original owner may have blown 200 punds (as the deeds spell it) of his own cash on this land nearly two centuries ago, but no one has thought to spend a penny on it cleaning it since.

A gallon of free surface spray and the blighters staggered off, quietly expiring. No punds, in ten dead, leaving me with a polishing job. 

The barbecue worked, I’m glad to say I didn’t warm the house more explosively than intended, and the hovel was roundly applauded.

The Bottle of Britain

"There’s not a lot out that way" I remember a chap at a petrol station (Sorry – that’s Servo in Strine) saying when I took the road to the Windsor in 2003. There was far less in 1963 when the chap who cuts hair (calling it a hairdressing salon would be pushing it) has told me it was nothing but a dirt road until you hit (hopefully not literally) the New Road.



Sheepshagger Gold out in the Colonies



Now it’s a major four lane highway, and there’s even a little pull in shopping centre (sorry, Mall) with – woohoo! an off licence (sorry, bottlo).

Now in most Aussie drive in bottle shops (Only in Australia, as they say) if you want decent tasting beer you’re banging your head against the wrong tree.

Indeed, they don’t stock a lot in there, but tucked away down the bottom of the shelf there is a small "European" beer section, with a few well travelled bottles. Very well travelled – some was not even destined for the Aussie market.

Take for example a bottle of Cairngorm Brewery Sheepshagger Gold. It’s been made – as you might expect – from pure highland spring water, but then bottled and labelled in French for the Quebec market, along with deposit marking for Canada. Another sticker was added in Perth, from where it seems to have travelled by lorry to Adelaide, and received SA deposit markings. How it got to New South Wales is beyond me, but I’m grateful it did.

A huntsman riding by

Moving my termites was a bad thing. Not only do my walls have holes in them, it’s also disturbed the spiders. Not that I knew anything about it until there was an ear piercing shriek, and “it was the size of a 20c piece”.

Not that I could see it. I sprayed the bejezus out of the skirting boards, but all that happened was I got a nice shiny polish going on all the exposed floorboards.

“He was over there. He was the size of a beer mat”.

Huntsman spider, post thong 

Fortunately I’ve read the dummies guide to lethal forms of Australian wildlife, and while snakes can drop a horse at a hundred meters, and even cuddly things like platypuses (should that be platipusi?) can take your arm off, the huge spiders found in Australian gardens are generally harmless. Its the ones the size of your thumbnail that you need to keep an eye on.

“Look under the table. He was the side of a dinner plate”.

Bar, that is, their ability to fill your underpants. I’d pretty much given up on spotting the critter when he came galloping around the corner, skidding on the newly polished floorboards, and charging towards me. He was indeed the size of a bull, leaping fully two feet (or perhaps, eight feet, as that’s what he seemed to have) this was a Goliath Bird-Eating Tarantula... or, in Aussie terms, a Huntsman, which never mind how pleasant they look, have a name that chills your heart down to your collarbone. It does, after all, Hunts... Man.

Running right under my feet, I was firmly convinced the end had come... of the sofa. I pulled it apart, but of the spider there was no sign, until I took the entire room apart and upended said sofa. He sat there glowering at me.

Then the god of small thongs landed on his head, and ended his pre-emptive dash for freedom. It then just remained to scrape the remains of the giant bird-eating Huntsman off the antique floor boards before his goo started eating through the wood.

Alas, I’ve now done even more research into the humble Huntsman, and found that many Aussies like them, and instead of whacking the blighters into kingdom come, welcome them because... wait for it... they keep the cockroaches down.

A Glove in the time of Cholera

Hurrah! I have completed a room. Just one room remember, but it’s now looking all swish and rather New England beach house meets shack in the bush.

Therefore, I can looking at which room to work on next, but before that I need to examine my termites. And to do that I need to rip huge chunks of weatherboard of the walls.

True, the pest report said that there were no active termites, but there’s a little distressed wood around some of the weatherboarding. Right now I think it is the home owner that is becoming a little distressed.

The planks just fell apart: it’s quite apparent that it is just the paint holding the place together, and inside the wood is a pleasant track of termite runs where they’ve eaten away my house.

Thankfully the builders who rebuilt this place in 1993 after it closed as a pizza restaurant had some boards cut up to just the right dimensions and profile, and even better stored some in the loft! That’s saved me a fortune from nipping down to the woodyard to get some more cut. Oddly, it’s these new planks that have been nibbled away wholesale by the pesky little mites, and the old 150 year frame and older planks are untouched.

I've been advised to wear gloves doing this sort of destroy-your-house with one tug type operation, however I'm made of sterner stuff: their may be the remains of Cholera in the walls - or at the very least some of these pesky spiders - but they aren't going to come near me.

However, I’d like to protect the lot: among the myriad of termite control solutions are sprays, barriers, and baits. Bring ‘em on – all I need to do is get all my ducks in order and lined up in a row before I shoot them.

The Bonfire of the Vanities

There is a vast pile of furniture piling up in one of the back offices, with desk upon desk, and yet more desks on top of that. Its jolly decent of the guys who flogged this place to leave all their junk behind – but a right pain it is too, getting rid of it.

This Formica has been hewn from the hills of Tuscany, carefully moulded, and then finely chiselled by the best craftsmen known to New South Wales who’ve added shelf units at just the right height to smack you in the forehead, and vanity units in really inconvenient places around odd corners. Oh, and then some pillock has not only built the office walls around it, but put the skirting board in place so you can’t remove the desk, and then to add insanity to injury, painted around the whole thing, and even left the masking tape in place.

I should of course have planned carefully, and since this is the time to “Remember, remember the fifth of November”, gunpowder, treason, and plotting how to move very large pieces of furniture from one room to another, just chopped up the desks, built a large bonfire, and be done with it. After all it is of course one of the most important nights of the year for annual celebrations, Bonfire Night. Sadly, this is one of the many things that is banned in Australia. Apparently it is a safety hazard.

So, with nothing else to do, I’ll have to chop them up for logs, and burn them in the grate. Desks burn really well in winter.

The god of mall things

Yes! I’m very excited. I’ve finally got my hands on the Australian holy grail. I now have a way of providing power that isn’t an instant turn off – my sockets are in. And I now know what the Aussies think of Poms who work on their houses.

Mad Englishmen who work in the midday sun, that’s what.



Clipsal flat brushed aluminium metal power socket 



I had the call to say that my sockets had arrived, and after I wandered down to the ‘Mall’ (As Aussies call their rather small decrepit shopping centres on the outskirts of an equally small decrepit industrial estate) I the usual conversation about “I ordered this” “They don’t make ‘em” “Oh yes they do”. I could see it wasn’t going very well, but I didn’t realise it was going to go downhill from here. The occer kept on assuring me that Clipsal never makes flat plate aluminium sockets, and when he finally did look in the catalogue, and then just about got over his hangover enough to look in the storeroom to find my sockets. He didn’t however move fast enough (it’s that hangover over again... see, it will come up and bite you!) to stop me from seeing the piece of paper with the order on the front. “Order: 5 plates Name: Posh Pom”.

No wonder then that he decided to charge me a totally different price from the one I was first quoted. It started out at $77, then went up to $87, and we finally settled on $83. Nothing like fleecing the tourists.

That really gets up my goat.

The Light Fangtastic

Ah... Halloween. The traditional time when annoying kids are allowed to virtually lynch you, and all you can do is smile sweetly and hand them sweeties. Except it’s not – Halloween is no part of the Australian tradition (or the British one either) but that doesn’t stop zombie walks in Brisbane and Sydney (I’m not kidding: there are that many zombies staggering along the pavement you could have thrown a frying pan in any direction and hit six) before the ghoulishness has peaked with Halloween.

And living in what is being described as “that old spooky haunted house on the hill” not surprisingly; trick-or-mugging sweet-grabbers have come-a-knocking at the door. Never mind that the lawn is freshly mown and even the outside lights work, from the way they approach it, you’d think it was a cross between the Adam’s family and Fangtasia.

However, telling them that Halloween is simply an American commercial sales technique went down like a lead blanket.

And even the local post office in the small little hamlet down the road has everything a well-dressed ghoul would need, including varieties of plastic teeth, 50 types of alternate witches' hats, 30 different types of weapons and a range of tombstones. When I nipped down for a haircut and walked past I did however find – and was thankful for - that they have sold out of fake blood and cobwebs.

Not that I need any – the place is alive with real cobwebs. Hundreds of ‘em, and some real nasty spiders too: I got zapped by a golden orb spider when I spent the afternoon stripping back positively Amazonian thick vines over the front flower bed to allow my giant Leyland Cypress trees room to grow.

My hand is now throbbing, and looks scary enough to put any kid off his fake fangs.

Drainspotting

I’ve spent my day with my arm up my U-bend, which – trust me - isn’t a euphemism.

It does however get interesting looks from the neighbours, and is of crucial importance when washing up, if you don’t want a fountain of water between 2 and 6 inches high (depending on how many beers you’ve had when telling the story) from shooting up the other sink, and spraying you with d’merde.

Which is all the stranger, considering the bleeding thing isn’t blocked. It’s had gallons of drain cleaner, and half a mile of wire pipe cleaner poked down the hole, and if I could see inside it would be as clean as a whistle. Except I can’t as it wends it’s weavy way through every inch of the labyrinth under the hovel, out through the wall, under the shrubbery where Lizzy the blue tongue lizard sleeps, and beneath the car park.
I did think of pouring some petrol down, and lighting a match, but if you try that trick down under, they come down on you like a can of worms.

Finally, however, I have a solution! I would should Eureka! However, rather like Archimedes after leaping out of his bath, I’m covered, head to toe, in 30 years worth of raw sewage. When I unscrewed the vent cap off the top of the drain, there was a rush of air, a gloop, and a fountain between 2 and 6 feet high (depending on the tour guide) of the primeval gloop that was down my sink.

Would you believe the pillocks that built it, forgot to put an air vent in. Who would think that drains need air, or you end up with vacuum that will consume small rodents whole.

Socket and see

Let’s talk sockets. It’s not every day you sit around and discuss the design of that most urbane and humble of items, the electrical power socket in the wall – but in Australia when designing a renovation, it’s actually a matter of some importance. To me, that is. Pretty much everyone else ignores the things, and gets on splashing paint around.

However, while I’m lying on the floor drilling into the wall, to get the cables ready for power to the people, I’ve had plenty of time to contemplate the concept of power socket design.

There is however a problem with the design of electrical sockets in Australia. Two problems, infact. The design of the socket plate, and the design of the switch next to the socket.

Now, I’m not talking about the design of plug. Although, there is plenty to criticise here: it is a design first created in the US in 1916 (US patent 1,179,728 no less) and it started to be used in Aussieland in 1937 by electricians who had emigrated from California (also used by the Kiwis, plus bizarrely Argentina and Brazil). It’s now become a core part of AS 3112 – vital bedtime reading if you want a miracle cure for insomnia. With thin pins that can get bent, sockets are easy to damage, plugs frequently come loose, and it can only take a low current. There isn’t even a fuse in the plug to protect the cord. Good, it isn’t.

No, I’m talking about the universal rocker switch in Australia. Small and oval, it’s a pain to switch on and off, isn’t obvious which position it is in, and as ugly as sin. It’s nearly, but not quite, as bad as the US universal switch, the toggle.

Compared to the vast array of choice of both socket faceplates and switches you get in most countries, Aussie walls have identical white plastic rectangles (they come in only one size too!) with the same identical 1980s style of switch.

Which is why I’ve spend hours on this new interweb thing trying to track down someone – anyone! – who will sell me something totally different. A metal plate with a big switch.

There is a company in Queensland that imports switches from the UK: however they have to be individually tested and they cost a fortune: a fiver in the UK translates into well over $100 here. Or you can import them from the US or Japan. However – instant factoid! – did you know that in the US light switches are upside down compared to the rest of the world. Or in Japan they are sideways, to avoid the risk they may be switched on accidentally in an earthquake?

Indeed, it the AS 3112 Australian electrical wiring standard that is to blame for much of the design woes, as it specifically specifies (if you’ll pardon the alliteration) the small oval switch. Elsewhere it’s up to you, although in the US they like their rocker switches, but they produce an annoying loud click (The design, patented in 1916 by Newton and Goldberg, intentionally does this to stop the contacts burning out). Then there are rocker switches, near-universal in the UK where MK produce them in large numbers.

Now Clipsal, the German company which is responsible for blighting thousands of Aussie homes with its one design fits all approach has come up with – thank goodness – a proper metal plate socket too. Vastly expensive and still with that ugly switch, it does however offer the prospect of not making your eyes bleed.

I would go out and buy a dozen, but at $90 a pop, I don't want to hatch all my eggs in the one basket until the chicken hits the fan.

As for plugs – there is an alternative. A socket which takes both Aussie and UK plugs: considering the British Standard BS 1363 13amp plug is now becoming a defacto standard around the world from Hong Kong to Singapore – and 32 other countries - it makes sense to be able to connect. Alas, it’s even uglier than the plain variant!

Sat on a hot tin roof

Today, I’ve moved into the gutter. It’s a pleasant place, with good views, and excellent drainage.
Many Australian houses seem to have a problem with damp: mine included. There also seems to be corresponding connection between most Australian home-owners and their hatred of vines or climbing plants, which is odd, as the two are totally separate issues.

There is no doubt that one of the most effective transformations of any building is a covering of green foliage which periodically erupts in blossom. Even the most ugly 1960s Baulkham Hills eyesore fake Spanish disaster can have the chocolate-box aesthetic if adorned with the right plant life. Incongruous extensions mellow under a facade of greenery. In autumn, a house covered with flaming red Virginia creeper takes some beating. The long star-like leaves turn from green to stunning reds and purples at the time most other plants are starting to fade into the background. No less an authority than the Royal Horticultural Society recommends carefully chosen creeper. Wisteria for Regency Houses, Virginia Creeper for those with a Victorian aura, and hanging bunches of grapes for those moments when you want wine, and want it out of the window.

However, builders seem to have a hatred of the stuff. Quite often developers take thousands of pounds off the value of rambling Victorian buildings, covered with a carefully trained ancient wisteria, draped with delicate lilac lanterns, by removing the best feature to reveal an unrelenting drab grey exterior. From eye-catching to eyesore in an afternoon – much, it must be said, to the horror of local residents.

The same builders will often claim a miracle cure for damp, just by burning down the vegetation. It won’t, but that doesn’t stop them charging thousands for the privilege, and then thousands more to add in their next miracle cure of chemical damp proofing that rarely works.

The worst enemy of old houses is we humans - it's generally what we fail to understand about the building that causes most of the problems and make you think you have to Damp Proof it. In recent years, Rising Damp specialists and building surveyors recommending damp treatment have caused massive, and in many cases, irreparable damage to old buildings through their incompetence. Don't use them, particularly in Australia where most surveyors – as I proved in the postings from mid August – have little idea either about damp, creeper, or the construction of any building pre-1970s. It gave me a good laugh to read the surveyors’ report that damp in the house was probably as a result of the ivy on the walls.

Except there is none. Instead, there’s lots of Virginia Creeper. Gallons on it, climbing so high up the wall, it’s reached chimney level. Virginia creeper or five-leaved ivy (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) is a woody vine native to south eastern Canada. It is a noble plant, reaching heights of 20 to 30 m in the wild. Because the vine adheres to the surface by disks rather than penetrating roots, it doesn’t harm the building or masonry but keeps the building cooler by shading the wall surface during the summer, saving money on air conditioning.

It does however have the slight drawback that it loves gutters: they are at just the right height for it to bask in the warm Australian winters. And in doing so it successfully blocks the whole thing up.

Which explains why I’ve spent the best part of a day 20 feet up a ladder, on a baking hot day, while the lightning forks down around me, and the rain descends in torrents. Here it’s clear what the problem is. It overflows those gutters, and comes tumbling down the wall – coincidentally causing all those damp problems , that the builders assure you can only be cured by turning the building into an eyesore, and by spending a lot of money.

Rather to my surprise I didn’t get struck by lightning, and lived to tell the tale of a day in the merde, slowly scooping handfuls of the 20 years worth of filth out of the gutter. It was to the top of the brim, and had small trees growing in it – I’ve now got enough vegetation to keep my compost heap running for a year, gutters that flow beautifully clear.

Plus, a cure for damp that didn’t cost me a penny.

Be careful he might shear you

“Why on earth did you buy this dump?”So says our Telstra correspondent.

One of the delights of the Aussie Wit in the lucky country is their direct no-nonsense approach to communication. They see a spade and nothing will dissuade them from expressing an opinion on its use as digging equipment.

Now there are many good things about moving to a life down under. The Sun. The Beach. The Quaint trade practices that the mother country abandoned 20 years ago.

Like, for example, the curious way that Telstra will insist on sending around to your house a fully qualified telephone engineer to plug your telephone into your socket, in the rather curious 1950s belief that this is way beyond any homeowner’s capabilities. After all, these modern speaking devices are very complicated bits of machinery.

Bright new upstart companies have tried for many years to break into the Australian telecoms market, but Telstra still insist on employing legions of engineers, at vast expense, and then charging their competitors for the service.

Occasionally, politicians do try and save households money by introducing proper competition law into Australian, but they're faced with the unions and a dominant industry. Oh, and a hung parliament, which doesn't help.
And so, I get an engineer who comes round, and plugs in the phone. He doesn’t do anything particularly constructive, like work out the extension wiring, or even something as basic as plugging in the internet. Suggestions that he might are like water off a sheep’s back.
He does however give his judgement on the place. “Bit of a dump isn’t it. Heritage listing means you can’t even change the paint colour without a DA. Why on earth did you buy it when you could have a modern house like everyone else?”
Exactly.

The existential postman

Apparently, I don’t exist.

This profoundly dispiriting human condition has come about largely due to Australia Post, on whose shoulders much of the problems of the world must rest. And, when I phoned up the sorting office to ask why, in the past 3 weeks, I’ve had exactly no post, I got the rather strange answer:

“I’m sorry, but you don’t exist.”

This wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear. However when I enquired about the conditions of this existence – or lack of - rather than hypothesizing a human essence, I encountered the natural existential obstacle and distractions including despair, angst, absurdity, and alienation. For the benefit of our English speaking audience, that is a slight dose of phone range.

And it’s not as if post for this house hasn’t been arriving – it has, by the bucket load, for The Firm (as they shall henceforth be known) that previously knew it as their address. There are invoices by the sackful, normally addressed to the head of purchasing, or the vice of supply, but as they get increasingly desperate, the invoices sometimes just name the company. You know they’ve lost the will to live when they just address their latest bill to “The occupant”. Indeed, despairing though these letters might be, it would be good to receive them in my box. But, like Godot, the letters never come, and instead get stuffed into my neighbour’s slot.

And that yields something else that existentialists know well - Angst, sometimes called dread, or even anguish which is a term that is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is generally held to be a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility. The archetypal example is the experience one has when standing next to your postbox, where one not only fears looking in, but where one also dreads the possibility of phoning up the sorting office again, and then throwing oneself off the nearest cliff.

It’s not exactly a hard thing for the postman to put post in the box with the same number that it is addressed to, however after putting ever larger signs on the box, and begging them to put it in the right one, finally I do at least have an answer as to why this is, infact, impossible.

“You don’t exist. There is no registered post point at that address.” Pointing out that I’m calling from somewhere that doesn’t exist didn’t seem particularly helpful, and infact when I did mention it, it was clear that they were talking what I said with a huge dose of salts. Asking to be put in touch with someone who could make me, in fact, exist again, didn’t help either.

“When your house is built, ask your builder to get in touch with the council, and they will be able to get in touch with the land registry, and we will create a post point for you!” cried the Australia Post voice with a touch of glee, clearly having the joy that only getting an annoying Pom off the phone can achieve. “Do you have a completion date when construction will stop on your house?”
“1886”.

I do despair. It is a truly human condition. As Kierkegaard defines it in his Either/or: "Any life-view with a condition outside it is despair." In other words, it is possible to be in despair without despairing. And it’s not the despair I can’t stand: it’s the hope. The hope that I’ll get someone to make me exist.

And finally, at the Land Registry, I found someone who – with amazement in her voice – dusted off a piece of parchment, finally found the house, and even better faxed off said parchment to the sorting office with a map on it, and an arrow marked “post box here”!

As Sartre puts it in his “Existentialism is a Humanism”: Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. Or rather, the joy of the first piece of post: a bill from Foxtel, saying they are increasing their prices for viewers who just want to receive BBC World.

Well, that’s all right then. I can now get back to the main task of making sure the hovel doesn’t fall down.

Sweeping beauty

“But I always walk over your lawn. It’s shorter.”

I’m not sure if it’s a cultural thing, but in Australia I’ve noticed that there seems to be slightly less sensitivity to personal space and property. So, it came as no surprise to find that the house seems to have turned into a kind of short cut for anyone who is everyone, and no man shall stop them.

Now, my lawn may be shorter than it has even been – thanks to the attention of both the consistent gardener, and also my chopping bi-weekly with a little Victorian hand mower – but I don’t think this is quite what the massed hoards that use this short cut mean. True, it is much easier for them to walk up the garden path, and out through the car port, but as they wander through. But as I’m sweeping the lovely expanse of tarmac that was once – fifty years back – a lovely vegetable patch, I can’t help going into bucolic mode “git orf my land” mode.

On a separate note, to introduce a Pandora's can of floodgates into the china shop, let me recap on that last sentence. I did just say sweeping – which seems to be a bit of a novelty in Sydney, for come Autumn, when the leaves start to descend, there is also the romantic sound of dozens of demented chainsaws to be heard around the Hills District. It is the sound of leaf blowers. No one actually uses such a thing as an old fashioned broom in these here parts.

Other quaint old things that the neighbours have laughed at me for, include what I believe the kids call analogue devices, such as include sanding down wood with a piece of sandpaper – rather than an electric sander – driving a screw in by hand – using that old fashioned device known as a screw driver – and, here’s a novelty. Using a lawn mover that has no motor. Just a good old fashioned Victorian push along mower. It producers a lovely razor cut, and best of all, it is noiseless.

Life on the Hedge

Let’s talk trees. And not any old trees. Oh no, these are trees that spark wars, riots, and attacks of the manic hedge trimmer.We’re talking Leyland Cypress here – or Cupressocyparis leylandii, to give it a proper name. It’s the quickest growing conifer, growing as much 4 feet (that’s over a meter in Catholic) a year. At Bedgebury Pinetum in the UK the Leylandii are 130 ft tall and still growing strong.

The Leyland Cypress has been cast in the role of the villain, thank to a number of disputes between neighbours over boundary hedges. Back in the mother country, the Government is expected to shortly ban them, following the Department of Environment study 'High Hedges: possible solutions'. And a Consultation Paper on the topic. There’s even a telephone hotline to report urgent hedge problems –Hedgeline.

And yet in “A hedge too far” it is made clear that this is a noble breed. The Leyland Cypress is not found in the wild. It came about because man brought together two species from distinct genera of plants from different regions that would otherwise never have met. The parent trees came from opposite ends of the Pacific coast of N. America - the resulting cross between a Monterey Cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) from California and the Nootka or Alaska Cypress (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis). The original progenitors were growing close together in a tree collection in Park Wood, Leighton Hall near Welshpool, in Powys.

The hybrid was named after Christopher John Naylor (1849-1926), the eldest son of John Naylor (1813-1889) of Leighton Hall; Christopher John changed his surname to Leyland in 1891 on inheriting the Leyland Entailed Estates. 20 years later, a cross occurred at Leighton Estate when the cones of the Monterey Cypress were fertilised with pollen from the Nootka. The result of that cross was baptised "Leighton Green" in 1911 – when my house was already half a century old. As a hybrid, Leyland Cypress are sterile so all the trees in Australia have resulted from cuttings originating in Welshpool.

And these Leighton Greens are what I bought down at Parklea Markets this weekend, at $10 a tree – a pricey sum considering I need about 20 of the blighters to screen off the road from the house. Odd though it may sound, this is actually an environmentally sensitive way of reducing the quite horrific road noise: a thick bushy green barrier is much better than high brick wall. It looks better too.

However I can’t help feeling that I'm living life on the hedge, and the neighbours, when they see the cute, wee, little trees, are going to form a ravenous hoard with pitchforks, axes, and the obligatory chain saw.

Mind you, you can't run around with your head stuck in the sand sitting on the fence. And it may take a while – the plants I put in are all of 18 inches high.

One hundred years of solid food

Moving to a new house is like frequent travel – it broadens more than the mind. There are many advantages to living in a historical cottage half way to the Hawkesbury. The charm. The character. The availability of takeaways.

Sadly, since moving here, I’ve discovered that the house is directly opposite a strip mall of some of the best takeaways known to man. Even rather rotund rolly polly man.I mean, just look at them.

For a start there is the Hilltop Indian, which specialises in both North and South Indian food (hmmm – hedging its bets then?) Then there is Danny’s Pizzas, with the best in Organic Pizza (the Pizza Palour previously known as Kellyville Pizza – also the best in Organic...) A Dominos, for those moments when the pizza company that knows no constant name won’t do. Thai Spy – guess what, they sell Thai. Do you see what they’ve done with the name there? Chinese, times two. A burger bar (which, alas, has a ban on beetroot in the burgers). Arthur’s Restaurant, with the best in contemporary Australian (which seems to be pasta, curry, steak, and pies). And look, there is even an offy! The list goes on.

And quite frankly, as a growing boy, I need this food. I’m certainly growing – outwards. Still, having someone else cooking is better than a slap on the face with a blunt fish.It may be windy on the top of these here hills, but there’s no danger of going hungry.

Pole to Dipole

UHF. It’s a word to strike terror into the heart of broadcasters down under.

Which is odd, considering the rest of the world adopted it a full half century ago.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself here... let me explain.

In the beginning there were dinosaurs. But they got too fat and died out. Then man arose. And he invented television. It used a system called VHF. However this was gloriously inefficient. So he moved onto UHF, as far back as 1972. By 1985, the last VHF transmission was heard – or rather seen – in the UK. But in Australia, they like to do things just a little bit differently, and continue to use the same technology that was designed back in 1935 when television first hit the ether. VHF (or Very High Frequency – as opposed to UHF: Ultra High Frequency).

And so, you end up with the curious sight in Australia of ranks of houses all looking like something that make a Radio Ham excited: huge piles of aluminium piled up on the roof, instead of small, neat UHF aerials.

Now, move forwards in history a little while, and you’ll get to digital TV. The Aussie government wisely decided this should be UHF only, and the valuable VHF spectrum sold off, to raise millions for the taxpayer. However Australian broadcasters looked at the costs involved at building a new mast, disagreed, and the government backed down. Coincidentally costing the taxpayer millions, but avoiding a nasty spat with channel 9 or 10, which could have brought down the government. Except for the ABC and SBS of course, who were told to go the UHF route anyway.

So – excuse me if I’m digressing – this is why you find me, standing on a roof with a great 12 foot long and 10 feet wide VHF TV Aerial straight out of the arc, trying to get something that few countries provide: Digital TV on VHF. After hours of trying, and rotating a little bit left or a little bit right, I gave up, and went back to the shop.

“This TV aerial is dead” I explained... no more, not even nailed to the pole. At least it won’t get any of these new fangled commercial channels – only the ABC.

They looked at a map, and then gently explained: because I’m more than 50km from central Sydney I’m in a regional area. Hence – no digital TV for me, unless I buy a “remote and rural” antenna.

To add in salt to injury, it’s fully 22 feet long, Log Periodic, with a dipole like central heating plumbing, and demands mountings that would stop the Titanic. Sadly, I’ve got one on special order from the manufacturer...

Kid Bolt: Outlaw

There are many things you can’t buy in Australia that you can buy in more enlightened countries. Chocolate digestives for example. Unpasteurised cheese. Door bolts.

Yep, I kid you not, Door Bolts have bought the dust. They are unobtainable in Australia. Oh, sure, you can buy little flimsy brass things that bend at the first sign of movement. But not the good solid, slide the bolt home with a solid foot of iron keeping out intruders from your castle. And why not? Because they are illegal, that’s why.

I’ve spent weeks going into every hardware shop known to man – or at least the Sydney Basin – and I’ve found nothing resembling the good old fashioned barrel bolt favoured by the Victorians and sold in their million ever since. Eventually the friendly chap in the Baulkham Hills ironmongers told me. Oh, you can’t buy those nowadays. Highly dangerous they are. What... a door bolt? Yep... the fire brigade banned the sale of them because, in the event of a fire, they need to be able to kick your door in. But hang on – think about it – doesn’t that mean that anyone can kick my door in? Thugs, thieves, milkmen, passing small children?

And now something at the back of what remains of my mind, springs to the fore. When I had the 2 – two! – surveys done on this heap of matchwood, both spent pretty much a page listing the faults of the bathroom door, and how:

The toilet area is restrictive and the door swings inwards. In case of an emergency, the door cannot be readily removed from the outside. Recommend that a new door with a BCA catch and lift off hinges be installed to the door to comply with the current BCA standards...

Whoa! So I’ve got to replace the lovely old Victoria door, and put on one of these flimsy Australian bend-in-a-breeze type door handles, to satisfy the fire brigade? And then leave the wobbly front door with a catch that will scarcely lock at the best of times.

Or, in a moment of pique, wish that I'd emigrated with some, then decide that there's no use locking the stable door after the chooks have burnt down, and order a dozen normal door bolts from B&Q in the UK via Mail Order. Purely for decoration you understand.

Lost in Transition

Why is it, when you move, you have twice as much junk as you thought you had, and can never find anything you want. Coffee mugs. The toaster. The piece of paper with a small number on it that you can’t actually extract from the company because it would be asking too much to ask them to move into the digital age and computerise their records so they could do something as basic as search for the number if you happen to, say, have mislaid it.

But it’s not any number. Oh no, it’s the number you need to get your deposit back if you’ve been lucky enough to rent a property in Aussieland. And from no less a body than NSW Fair Trading.

However, they need that bit of paper, which is why on moving day, when I was up to my armpits in saucepans, a voice asked if I happened to have it handy. I must have gone through every box. Every bag. There Aldi shelf - where I've been slowly buying toold from Aldi, each week they have something new on special. Even the cardboard box the car parts are stored in, looking for the piece of paper that they quietly sent a year back, with no indication that you’d actually need it. As if renting a house in Australia isn’t weird enough, with 100 point checks and the requirement to lodge your diving licence. Which of course you can’t get until get (the diving licence that is) until you have a permanent address. Catch 22 and all that.

Incredible to think that I actually arrived in this country with only my half of 100Kg (which I flew over with). If I want to go back, I’d need a container. And yet, of that little piece of paper, there was nothing to be seen. Until that is, a small voice popped up and said “Oh, here it is. I filed it with my papers from the house...”

The silence of the lamps

“The man who wired this up is a bloody idiot”.

Not my comment, but that of a professional electrician, describing just one of the curious battery of switches that line up by the back door. One is marked Floodlight, so you might, in your naivety, imagine that this would turn on the floodlight for the back drive. Oh no. Instead this light is on permanently, 24 hours a day – at least it is now I’ve replaced the bulb. It also has an auto sensor so you might think it turns on and off when you walk through in the dark. Think again. Time and space is in a continuum, empires may rise and fall, but that blinking bulb refuses to blink.

I kept on trying to figure it out, but I was barking up a brick wall.

Now elsewhere in the world if you want to fix something, you can fix it yourself. Not so in Aussieland, where there is such a closed shop that you can’t touch a wire yourself, because the electricians union say only they should touch the wires – and the government is so full of closed shop surrender monkeys, they believe them. In the UK the sparkies tried to bring in regulations like this – but initially just tried to stop DIY work in kitchens and bathrooms (the so called Part P of the Building Regs) have now been watered down at DIY insistence, and all you have to do is tell the council you’re rewiring it yourself, and if they want to check it, the council has to pay their own inspectors to have a look. Come down to the Antipodes, and the closed shop system is so (in)effective not only are wires out of bounds, they won’t even let you do your own plumbing. I kid you not: even taps come with legal warnings that if you change a washer without a licence, you’ll spend the next ten years down the local nick.

Which doesn’t explain why so called professionals have made such a total bodge-up of the whole job, that my switch doesn’t.

Thankfully, I have a tame, professional, electrician who was stunned at some of the bizarre logic employed for the lighting. Never mind the light-that-never-dies, there is also a switch that turns on all the lights in all the bedrooms (but no switch actually IN the room, which might be considered useful). Which offers a unique way of waking up the household at 3am when you stagger around looking for the bathroom. Add in the upstairs sockets on the downstairs lighting circuit, stove on a plug, and the three-phase supply for a small domestic dwelling, and...

We finally came to the conclusion that the man who originally wired up the house was either a genius or an idiot.

Bogan's Run

For the first time in my life, I’ve ordered satellite TV. I did used to think that calling up and saying “I’d like a subscription to the home of Boganism, and a lovely dish on the wall please” was right up there with saying “I’d like my leg cut off” and “I’m a bloke, I’m an occer, and I really love my VB”. But, in this ever shifting universe, I’ve finally come to the conclusion, that there are worse things that could happen, than sticking a Sat dish on the side of a 150 year old house. Three things have made me decide this.

• The lack of a TV aerial in the house, which makes for certain domestic tension.


• The complete lack of anything worth watching on domestic Australian TV.


• The huge internet costs that come about from watching decent TV from the UK, via the BBC iPlayer in Australia – the land that unmetered interweb access forgot.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the incredulous voice from India, when I called up the Foxtel call centre, asking for the most basic of basic packages, which gives you, well not a lot to be honest, but at least the basic terrestrial free channels and BBC World. It’s very hard to track down this basic package, as the awful Foxtel website hides away the details, and instead will only let you sign up for one of the major channel packages – at 100 dollars a month – but if you call up, you can force it through. So long as you have an iron will and nerves of steel, to put up with the pit-bull like sales drones. I was asked 8 times – 8 – to reconsider. “But sir... surely you want sports?” “Commonwealth games?” “How about if I sign you up and you can see if you like it?” “There are a lot of well packaged options” “There is a great package of film channels” “I hear you sir, but everyone watches sports?” Who is this everyone? Really?

That really gets up my goat.

I mean, really? It isn’t me. Although I see from today’s AFR that 80% of Foxtel’s 1.6 million subscribers take sports. And that the commonwealth games coverage costs an extra $85. I ended up just begging the guy to give me BBC World, with no HD, no extra recording boxes, no extra boxes in any other rooms, no extra anything, the most basic of basic channels I could get. Honestly – Australian Pay TV makes buying a TV licence in the UK seem like the bargain of the century.

The Consistent Gardner

There's nothing quite like a well-manicured lawn to set the day off right. And there’s equally nothing better than seeing someone going to the time and effort of cutting a lawn. Now, have all that happen, and someone has cut your lawn, and you didn't expect it, the day becomes so good, it’ll have tweety birds and everything. This is in the same mythical universe where someone will turn up and magically cut your lawn, for no obvious or apparent reason than they feel like it. Welcome to my world.

For some unknown reason, some person or persons unknown have turned up, mown the lawn, trimmed the hedge, swept up the leaves, and even neatly cut the edging around the bricks on the edge of now neatly cut lawn. It’s better than a kick in the teeth by a blind horse

Who are these people? Is this in some way connected to the theory that for every force, there is an equally and opposite force? Just as the lawn grows, so someone will want to come in and trim it? It’s all most curious.

A partial answer has come from the chap who has sold us the hovel. He says that for the past 15 years, ever since they built the town houses, someone has consistently turned up religiously to do the garden. They’ve never asked for money, no bill have ever been produced, and no one has ever spoken to, nor least seen, these people.

It remains a mystery as deep as UFOs, Telekinesis, the Bermuda Triangle, and the Loch Ness Monster.

Brave Newt World

Another day of turning perfectly good furniture into firewood. Today, the huge reception desk in, errr, reception, bit the dust. It was this lovely, custom made thing, that weights close on 100 stone (or, if you prefer that in Roman Catholic, 250kg) with a desktop you can disassemble cars on, and which is thicker than an office block. It’s also like one of those Chinese puzzles, with screws hidden behind false walls that are glued on, with trim stuck around them. At one stage I got so desperate I was on the stage of getting the axe from Aldi, and turning it into kindling for next winter. No fear, it eventually gave way under the weight of a yard long crowbar.

Meanwhile – as they say – out in the garden, which is growing ever more rampant and luxurious as the growing season ends (in Australia, things tend to grow wild in the winter, and then turn into a dry husk in the summer – never let it be said that it’s not a topsy turvey world Down Under, where even the seasons are reversed) I’ve been hearing this strange rustle in the bushes. What is this strange beast that lurks, undetected, in the shrubbery. Mice? Snakes? Snakes eating the mice? Another night parrot? No… it’s a family of newts that live down the well.

However, just at the moment, I can't really deal with them - I have too many irons in the air, and balls in the fire.

The Thirty Nine Stops

What a quite extraordinary system Sydney has for renting houses. Instead of the agents earning a living and, you know, showing you around, they just organise one open day when in half an hour everyone who wants to see the place can, and then they take in applications – on the day – and decide who they would like to rent to. Quite bizarre – and also, a huge pain if you want to rent a place, as you can go weeks without having an application accepted. But it’s a boon if you’re living in the house that is being let out – as we are – because you only get disturbed once, for half an hour, as an endless queue of people poke their noses into your house. Few of whom, it seems, actually want to rent it: it was fascinating seeing our neighbours trot around just for what the Aussies call a “sticky beak” (or, if you prefer that in English, a “Rubber Neck”). Others are on the continual hunt for a pot of gold – or, as it’s known in Sydney, a cheap decent place to rent. One couple at the viewing had seen 39 different places.

At least, once that is done and dusted, I can get on with the business of moving into the hovel, which will be the delightful abode while I’m renovating it.

Of course it’s only when you move into a place do you start to find the little quirks that leave you scratching your head, asking “why? Just... why?”

How, for example, did they get the dining room table – which has been left in the house – into the dining room? It’s just way too big to get through the door in any direction. I did think of either a) leaving it there, and it will, forever more, be the dining room. Or b) chopping it up for firewood. However, since it is sitting in the room that will become the main bedroom, and which is therefore destined to become the first room I’ll work on, I had to get the blasted thing out of there. Which entailed taking the whole thing to pieces. And of course, it wasn’t just screwed together. Oh no, they’ve glued and nailed it for good measure.

I’ve also started a list. It’s sort of leaning to one side, rather like my house at the moment. It’s a huge long list of jobs, including everything from as basic to removing the wasp nest around the security light, to sanding down acres – miles! – of ancient weatherboards.

The road less gravelled

If we didn’t complete today we'll be up a gum tree without a paddle. After all, the hopelessly awful townhouse we’re renting is back on the rental market, and indeed the open day is scheduled for tomorrow.

And how complex could it be just to hand a very, very big cheque to a chap who has been trying to offload a tumbledown farmhouse for three – three! years – at the end of what was once a gravelled road, but is now far less gravelled, and is far more a massive tide – ocean, no less – of tar

It's not rocket surgery but I firmly expected something to go wrong... and yet, and yet... it all worked. Whey!

However, against all expectations... 3pm came and went. But at 22 minutes past 3, I got an Email to hear that the hovel is all mine! All mine! Well, it will be in 25 years, when I’ve paid the bank off.

To Kiln a mocking bird

Today, I’ve phoned up and asked someone to remove a dead parrot from INSIDE my stove... only in Australia, as they say. Punch lines on a postcard. Yes, this is an ex-parrot. And it’s in my stove. Not exactly what I expected to say the day before completion, and the day I get my first look inside the prospective purchase since I had a quick 10 minute look around the inside.

Of course, the first hassle was parking. Never mind the 7 – seven! – car park spaces this place, apparently have. After the local residents have been helping themselves, including one cheeky chap who’s been parking his Ute under what will, tomorrow, be my car-port, at the far end of my drive, on my property, in the mistaken apprehension that MY stands for “Mine is Yours” I finally got in the door.

Two thoughts: And the first sight of this wondrous abode – in the dark, on a windy night – was that this place is much bigger than I thought it was. And the second is that it’s falling down faster than a heavily leveraged tower block in Dubai, and that living in a Travelodge would be way more comfortable.

It was so quiet you could hear a mouse drop.

And then, the horror struck. The birds! The birds! Yes, goodness knows how it flew in there, but there’s a Night Parrot. It’s sitting firmly inside what, tomorrow, will be my stove. And it’s also firmly dead. If it wasn’t propped up in the logs, it would be a pushing hup the daises. Goodness knows how it got there. Very pretty it looks too, having a mottled yellowish green belly, and, with a rather squat, fat – overfed – appearance. Maybe that explains by the blasted thing obviously flew down the chimney, and died. Probably in shock at the look of the hovel. It looks a little stunned: maybe it’s pining for the fjords, instead of gone to meet its maker. Sometimes I wish I could just erase parts of my memory. Then when I sit and think about it, I’m glad I saw him. I also would rather someone else went and removed the poor thing, and instead of nailing the deceased to its perch, it would run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.

One other fascinating observation. There is hot water! Lots of it! Yes, in an act of almost incredible stupidity, the vendors have kept the 5kW Hot water emersion heater switched on for the past three years, while the building has been abandoned! That’s about $0.25 an hour, $6 a day, $2190 a year, or $6,500 they’ve wasted! Incredible! Unbelievable! I almost feel good about the $4000 I lost changing the deposit from GBP to AUD at the wrong time...