Climbing the scaffold

Property prices being what they are, and inertia being what it is, many are choosing, instead of moving house to get more space, to go up, up, up and convert their loft, hitherto only used for the storage of Christmas decs, porn, and the desiccated corpses of deceased family members, into an extra room.  This means that houses all around the country have been sprouting cubes of shrouded scaffold wrapped around their roofs, turning them into giant Minecraft mushrooms.

Scaffolding is an interesting trade, you turn up, you erect a framework of metal, you wrap it in plastic sheeting then, after a couple of weeks, you rock up and unwrap the sheeting like a giant Christmas present – revealing a roof more or less exactly as it was before, but now sporting a dormer window.

Scaffolding is an all-weather profession and the scaffolders in the village at the moment are in their summer plumage – tee shirts and shorts.

It’s unusual for professionals not to be health and safety obsessed.  Your average builder is head-to-toe armoured like a medieval knight, from hard-hat to steel-capped rhinoceros-hide boots, with a high-vis jacket in the middle and, probably, Kevlar knickers.  The scaffolders’ sop to safety is that their shorts are cut-off denim jeans.  The only leather they sport is their tool-belt.

Possibly their swashbuckling attitude is party a result of their profession, they swarm up their framework with the confidence of animated monkeys and the assurance of a tall ship sailor going aloft for a spot of grog and buggery in the Crows Nest (the lookout point on the ship, not the popular homosexualist pick-up bar in Portsmouth).

The only people that exceed scaffolders’ disregard for health and safety measures are, well, the public.  Specifically, anyone that doesn’t work in the building trade but has a job to do that involves hiring equipment.  Very specifically, anyone who hires a chainsaw.

And I mean a Chainsaw.  Not one of those hedge-clipper things that are one step up from a male grooming product and run on electricity, no - a chainsaw, the sort that runs of petrol.  Leaded petrol, a machine that runs on dead prehistoric trees and the remains of dinosaurs and is wielded in popular culture by men wearing checked shirts, or masks made of teenagers unwise in their choice of vacation-spot.

When the hire company hire out a chainsaw you also get the safety kit, and a lecture even more frequently ignored than the ones given at the start of airplane flights.  The safety kit involves overalls, gloves, and a helmet with a mask (Perspex, not tanned teen).  All you need is a shield, lance and charger and you could joust the tree to death if you wished. 

The trouble is that in the shop, they show you the chainsaw first. 

Now, from first seeing the chainsaw, a chaps attention span before he succumbs to images of himself plying a manly trade, honestly despoiling the environment through deforestation rather than the usual method of being too lazy to recycle, is about ninety seconds.  This is long enough to cover the basics – petrol goes in here, pull this cord here to start the saw, make sure it is pointed away from you.  It does not extend to cover the safety briefing.  While the shop guy does his best to explain the precautions and equipment required to ensure that, should the fellow ever want to take up a career as a juggler in the future, this remains an option, and the bloke’s wife is nodding along, our hero has moved on from fantasies of Sylvanian desolation and is wondering what sort of damage this surprisingly heavy bit of kit could do to, in ascending order of disturbing – fruit, a marrow, anything for the barbeque, that old shed he’s been meaning to knock down and that fucking cockerel his neighbour has acquired.

Of course, the most effective safety briefing for a hired chainsaw is the first time you fumble and it buries itself in the ground half an inch from your big toe.  A ten minute break to change into all the safety gear, and new trousers, and you’re ready for action.

Norfolk notes - the rented car

This holiday, I decided, would be one where we travelled in style. This was to be Norfolk in October and so I wanted something that would accommodate the entire family and a wet dog with half of the beach clinging to it in comfort, where we could all sit together in damp anoraks waiting for the rain to cease and not have to worry about catching Legionnaire's disease from the condensation running down the inside of the windows. Also, it allows family members to be a comfortable distance from one another during any cooling off period following disputes about who gets to sit up front, choice of music and so on.

As it happened the weather was great, but having a big car brought other benefits, like legroom, being able to take a mountain of picnic with us and using a single car all the time, thus saving at least a tenner on parking, which was useful to offset the exorbitant cost of the rental.

The Chrysler Grand Voyager is, as the name suggests, big. It's so big that the rear passengers are in a different time zone to the driver. So big that the people in the back have their own climate controls, although what's really required is an intercom. It's so big that the middle row of seats fold down to form a picnic table and that, for me, sealed the deal.

There are other interesting features. For instance, the rear doors slide open instead of swing open and are electric, operated by the key for or buttons inside the car. For years, I have been opening and closing my own car door manually, like a mug, like a second class citizen. The Americans have realised that this, like any exercise that you don't pay to do, is demeaning and have simplified the whole process. Of course, a contributing factor to this labour saving luxury is that the damn doors are about as heavy as barn doors and to open them manually you need either a team of horses or a bloody good run up.

While the size was a bonus, I'm not sure it was a great idea in retrospect to. Choose that car for a trip to Norfolk that entailed daily jaunts along the narrow and winding road that runs along the coast, especially in the 'Stiffkey squeeze' and especially not at harvest time with so many tractors and other really, really large bits of agricultural machinery sharing the roads. It's when you hear all the passengers breathing in at the same time that you realise you've just had a narrow squeeze. That, and the fact that the wing mirror has been folded flat back against the car when you brushed that wall. Mirrors are like cats whiskers, if you can get them through a gap, the rest of the car will follow. Of course that's buggger all help if you've already firmly wedged the bonnet of the car be teen a wall and a chap on a mobility chariot.

With the wide seats to accommodate the larger posterior and the electric doors that hinted at a certain idleness, it comes as no surprise to learn that the car was designed by those conspicuous consumers, the Americans. Wide seats, lazy doors and it being an automatic rather than having manual gears I can deal with (even if I did try and change gear with the hand break for the first half hour) but even I was surprised by the number of beverage holders the thing had. There was even a beverage cup holder that flipped out of the side of the rear passenger seats! Is dehydration a feature of travel by road in America? I can understand if you want space for your big gulp if you are, say, driving across Death Valley, but how much fluid does one person need when they are popping to the shops.