To Strike? or not to Strike? That is the question…..

Source: Daily Mail 28 March 2012

Well, Cameron and his Cabinet minister Maude, have done a great job of handling an imminent strike by Tanker drivers.  This smacks of the year 2000, when I remember queuing up twice over to fill our cars with fuel.  Unfortunately now, as everyone turns to diesel as a fuel that supposedly has better miles to the gallon, this is the fuel that runs out first on the pumps.  Today, even the Police cars were filling at the pumps, along with all the tradesmen’s vans, and taxi’s.

Yesterday, everything was reassuringly normal at the pumps, which I greeted with a degree of optimism, a good sign that queues had not instantly formed at the first whiff of a fuel distribution problem.  However, all change today.

As Cameron announced that he thought a Strike would be ’irresponsible’, I am inclined to agree.  Like our economy needs a bit more bashing.  As fuel prices reach an all-time high, and now commonly exceeding 1.44 GBP a litre, that is getting towards twice the price it was back in 2000.  Everyone knows that fuel duty is a nice little earner for the government (even though they strenuously deny this despite the post-budget realisation that customers will be paying another 3p more per litre after the summer….).  In Switzerland, prices were pretty low considering the cost of living as the fuel duty was quite low. Now, instead of 85CHF (60GBP) a fill up, it’s costing me about 90 GBP (130CHF) a fill here in the UK for diesel.  In Switzerland, if you really had to, you could depend on public transport to get you anywhere.  It would take a bit of planning, but it can be done.  Regular interconnected affordable mass transit.  Here, the investment has been woeful, and the bus network remains skeletal at best.  What few buses run run empty just because they are so infrequent they are not worth the effort. It’s not that cheap either.  I have to use fuel every day for a 10 minute drive to school because there were no Year 3 places in Wokingham town centre together with Year 6 vacancy in the same school.  I have a school run to do every day.  I must admit, I am looking forward to the time when both girls are in the same town, and our fuel bill will go down by about 45 GBP a week!

Thankfully, we are pretty close to the town centre, so we will be able walk and shop locally for a while, and this will blow over.  Today, I genuinely needed to fill up, and I was queuing with the panicking masses in the search for diesel.  One Shell station in Wokingham has already run dry today.  Luckily, just down the road, BP still had some this afternoon.  Even there, people’s tempers were fraying, as some cars were trying to barge in and jump the queues.  I suppose there is still a degree of English queuing etiquette despite panic buying conditions!

The Army are now being called upon for contingency measures to supply emergency services with fuel, so that really gives us confidence that the government believe that the strike will be averted through the use of the ACAS conciliation service...  I am not sure that everyone is completely crystal clear as to why a strike is completely necessary.

The government were not only advising a top up, but extra storage in Jerry cans, so you can guess what will be the next thing to run out in the shops….

Move complete, second time within 6 months.

A pretty bouquet from our Estate Agent David Cliff

We took some time out today from unpacking, and took the girls to the local park and explored some footpaths local to our house.  The snow arrived last night in a big flurry and laid about 2 inches thick on the ground.  Knowing that the snow clearance in the UK no way matches the Swiss standard, I know I could be in for an interesting drive/ice skate to school tomorrow, as the snow was melting this afternoon and creating pools of water on the roads.  The scenery was beautiful out,  and even Laura could not resist making a snowman and creating a snow angel, you are never to old to have a little fun in the snow.  It did make me laugh, I do feel when good snowman snow has fallen, all the dads come out to show their prowess in snow modelling skill.  At the park, one dad was chamfering the edges of his childs figure with a plastic snow shovel.  One dad produced a large snow dog complete with tail, whilst another created what can only be described as a snowman inspired by an Easter Island figure….!  Not sure whether or not that was intentional..

I love taking pictures in the snow, it has a magical quality to it, but can be quite tricky to get good results, so I had to play around with the white balance a little.  The snow lay on these red berries, they looked like they had been a left over from Christmas.  

We also did a little exploring down what must be an ancient drovers lane to the south of Wokingham.  We emerged at Grays Pick Your Own fruit and vegetable farm.  It is certainly nice to have countryside within walking distance of our new home, and to be 5 minutes away from town.  We will have to wait and see what happens with this countryside, as they have been planning for years a Southern relief road for Wokingham, and a mini town to be developed to satisfy the government building targets for the South East, a great loss if that section of green belt is swallowed up by homogenous estate housing.

The temperatures here are nowhere near as cold as in Switzerland.  I took a sneek peek back at Reinach, BL just to see how cold it was.  Wow! -15 Degrees Celsius.  It’s been over 0 to about +2 degrees C. It is no wonder that our Swiss house was so well insulated.  That is one thing I really missed initially when I came back to the UK.  Our rental house was as cold as sin, but then it was no real surprise when even though the cavity wall had been filled, albeit retrospectively, the insulation in the roof was just a layer of dust really.  Thankfully our new home even though it was built 18 years ago, has a decent layer of insulation in the loft.  I have also started to lag some of the pipes (all done as standard in our Swiss house).  The boiler room in our new Swiss home emitted very little heat.  The hot water tank did not feel even remotely hot from the outside.  The pipes, the outside of the house was externally insulated with thick polystyrene blocks, the floors thermally insulated and underfloor heated.  The windows protected by shuttering and thick glazed composite frames.  Energy wise, it was a real low user.  The UK is lagging behind in this respect really, and these aspects are now only just starting to become important here, particularly as energy bills have risen sharply over the last 5 years.  Now having to energy rate your home at the point of sale is making some people realise how leaky their homes are.  We are currently losing 20% of our heat straight out the window.  It does not help however, that our vendor took all the curtain and track fixings off every single window, and there is a 6-8 week lead time for our new curtains and blinds!

I think that the novelty of packing the contents of our house into cardboard boxes and then emptying some or all of their contents into a new abode has finally worn off.  I felt there was sufficient time in the run up for the Swiss to UK move to plan that everything run with Swiss efficiency and Swiss timing.  I knew that everything had to be wrapped up and officially stamped before leaving, so our departure would be as smooth as possible.  Our move on the 25^th-26^th January we felt suddenly crept up on us, and suddenly found ourselves a few days prior scrabbling around sorting mail redirections and changing our addresses.

We decided to reluctantly go with a local mover to save a bit of money, and boy you get what you pay for.  I am not sure our crew really liked each other that much.  Instead, the 2 days was spent with them tolerating each other.  I tried to sweeten them up with Hot cross buns, fried egg rolls, bacon and sausages rolls, but little seemed to make them happier.  Our international movers loved my food, and they were a good laugh too, making a stressful event go a little easier on the nerves.

A week on, and Steve set the challenge for us to empty all the local move boxes. We were pretty amazed to learn they will charge 5 GBP a box if we retain any, no wonder they are able to keep their quotes so low. We retained some of the international move boxes, as these weren’t unpacked for 6 months.  Luckily these boxes are white and our local move boxes brown, so it makes for an easy ID. I am now facing the demons of all the things that I failed to get rid of in Switzerland.  However, I do have a much wider range of charity shops here in the UK to send it all to!  My wardrobe was something I had been meaning to spring clean for some time, it’s one of those jobs that I would do anything to avoid.  I still have stuff I wore years ago.  I admit, I do have too much sentimental value attached to things.  I need more will power to throw it out.  I did do this with some cheap skirts I bought yonks ago for teaching in.  Now I have not been in the classroom for 8 years, so I thought it was finally time to let them go.  I did feel strangely better for loading it all into a charity bag, taking it to Cancer research in town before I could change my mind and think I could wear it again.

I do also admit to being a terrible food hoarder too.  After seeing how much food came out of the rental place (and the kitchen was not that big either) I was embarrassed.  However, I do have a lot of 'from scratch' ingredients and herbs for cooking.  I did vow that I would reduce the amount of excess food in the house, after about 10 or so big removal boxes came into the new kitchen, and I had to figure how an earth I was going to cram it all into the limited storage space I now have……!

Off to unpack a few more boxes no doubt...and hoping to find yet more miscellaneous missing items, and today found that the desk has been put back together with fewer screws that it was originally.  Same goes for the cupboards, let's just hope it won't all fall apart...

Guy Fawkes night

It was certainly nice to be back in the UK to sample the fireworks on November 5^th.  We went with good friends of ours to the local charity fireworks display in Cantley Park, Wokingham.  We were wondering, like the organisers whether it would actually go ahead, we had bought our tickets in advance.  Right up to the day before heavy rain was forecast, but instead the Unicorn Club in Wokingham was blessed with a dry night and the place was heaving with people to come and see the fireworks.  It was a really good display, and the bonfire had an Olympic runner with a torch that was lit containing fireworks, which fizzed for while setting the bonfire alight.  The Unicorn Club raised a whopping 23,000 GBP on the night for their nominated charities, including Prostate Cancer and Berkshire Air Ambulance.

The girls loved their present from Kate, a pair of luminous glow glasses, they were very easy to see in the crowds and distracted them completely from the fact that we had to wait another quarter of an hour to get the crowds in through the gates, genius Kate….genius… J

I really like going …’oooh’ and ‘ahhhh’ so enjoyed taking some pictures of the fireworks at the big display, however as they only explode in seconds, it is actually quite difficult capturing them at night when I only have a small Lumix camera (which always copes admirably in low light conditions) and no tripod, which you need for slow exposure shots really. 








A yellow tinged firework looked great, even though I did not manage to capture all of it!

We did of course, also have some of the obligatory fireworks at home.  It's every mans duty to advance on a box of home fireworks and light them to the amazement (or underwhelming disappointment) of their families.  Well, no expense spared, we used some of the fireworks left in the garage.  We thought that they looked fairly dry, and so we went ahead on the next day and lit some....

...most of the fireworks you buy tend to be labelled 'Roman Candle: A shower of golden sparkles'.  'Traffic light, a shower of coloured sparkles'.  I am sure that some of the fireworks we let off were not garden fireworks, but they shot up and let of a tremendous boom, we all jumped out of our skins!  We left a few to set off in the New Year....

Alice and Laura both had a healthy respect for the sparklers (they had both had a safety talk on them at school assembly on the Friday before), not something they have had much of a chance to experience up to now.  I am surprised that with all the Health and Safety regulations in the UK, that they still sell fireworks and sparklers, the ultimate hazardous experience of the year.