The Great Skylight Crisis of 2008: Part 1

Today should have been a good day. Today should have been quiet and relaxing. Today should have been a chance to get some more sleep after the horrible night of last. Having enjoyed a nice long drinking session in Burghead, crashing on my friend's floor seemed to be even more uncomfortable than usual.

As always, I was sleeping on a unique kind of airbed I’ve never actually used before. It's smaller than a normal one, and has no pillow section. When it comes to comfort however, it's on par with a bed of nice soft nimbus clouds. Actually, maybe the clouds are a bad example. A rusty sheet of corrugated iron would perhaps be a bit closer.

Anyway, having spent the majority of the majority of the night fighting my other friend for the covers, banging my head on a Playstation 3 that had for some reason been left in a bag next to my head, and turning down the offers for some light sodomy and quenching my ever growing thirst with warm Coca-Cola, I got roughly two hours sleep.

So the plan, inevitably, was to come home and curl up under the sheets of my glorious warm and soft double bed and catch up on some of those Z’s lost to the torcher device, I mean airbed.

It was not to be.

The first problem came when I opened the front door to find my brother up a ladder with his head in the loft. To put this in perspective, the only times anyone ever goes into the loft is either when there’s something terribly wrong with the house, or when it is Christmas time and the long, arduous task of bringing the decorations down is thrust upon the household.

And I wasn’t wearing a party hat and pulling crackers.

As it turns out, due to the immensely strong winds of recent days combined with the immensely old age of my house (in certain versions of the bible the last supper was actually hosted in my living room) meant that one of the skylights in the loft had been completely blown free of it’s frame, and had plunged mercilessly to the ground.

At this point, I supposed it is worth pointing out that there are several things to be thankful for. After all, had someone been walking past when the glass landed, they could have been killed, or worse, severely injured. Then they would have hired a big-shot lawyer, who would then have pointed out that I have a Duty Of Care for in and around my property, and therefore should have signs warning passers by that they may be struck by falling plains of glass and other parts of the house. Mr Lawyer and his injured but oh-so-unforgiving client would then proceed to sue me and take all of my money, and I will be forced to live on the street and avoid other people’s falling windows, because I will be homeless and unable to afford my own big shit lawyer.

Happily, no one was injured, so all that was left to do was figure out what to do. The obvious thing would be to call the Royal Bank of Scotland, whose insurance scheme allows immediate response in the case of a household emergency.
An emergency? If it were to rain during the night when the window wasn’t mended, water would enter the house, seep through the ceiling, and thanks to the position of the skylight in question, would then leak all over my bed, which would then make it look like I had leaked. This sounds like an emergency to me.

However, according to the bank, since the seven-headed beast from the Book of Revelations wasn’t currently attacking the house, this wasn’t serious enough to be classed as emergency, and they weren’t going to send anyone.

This meant we’d have to call in a joiner, who would shout a lot, smoke in the house, scare the cat, wear a cap, leave doors open and make fun of the long haired guy because he supports Kilmarnock. So what I had expected to be a morning of sleep and relaxation had turned into a morning of double strength hot coffee, and even hotter tempers.

And do you know what? It’s (un)surprisingly hard to get hold of a joiner in such short notice, towards the end of the school holidays. Having phoned several joiners, who would in return tell me that they couldn’t do anything, and I should try this other man, who might be available. He wasn’t, and nor was the man he recommended, trying, or the one he also recommended.

Having gotten through more cups of coffee than the entire Friends gang put together, it was time to phone the Bank again, who would be able to send a man over to place a piece of wood where the window used to be as a temporary. And right now, I’m sitting here with my eleventy twelfth millionth coffee, awaiting the possibly psychopathic man to turn up with is board of wood.

Will the window ever be properly fixed? Will I ever get time for my well-needed sleep, and if I do, will I be able to sleep after all this caffeine? Will the man be a normal nice person, or a certifiable lunatic who will impale me on a sharp corner of 6x12 inch wooden board?

All of your questions – providing I haven’t been brutally murdered - will be answered in part 2.
So please, pray for me.

Back in time at twice the speed of sound.

As I type this, we are at the peak of technology. We have the vast network that is the interweb, we can watch our favourite films in the middle of the ocean, we have microwavable rice, a space station in orbit, and the days of crawling through ice fields on a week long journey to cross the Atlantic are over, we can now get there in a mere 6 hours. Yet, we used to be able to do that in half that time.

Concorde's withdrawal from service was the biggest technological step backwards since, well, ever really. While the Americans have the claim of putting a man on the moon, even the top dogs at NASA will admit that creating an airliner that can do Mach 2 was a bigger challenge than Apollo 11. For many years now we have had jet fighters flying up in the stratosphere, but these are for one man with a triangle torso in a flight jacket with wires coming out of it. But this was for many men in suits, with briefcases and beer guts. How on earth were we going to do this?

Fortunately, we managed. While most of the countries who signed up for the challenge pulled out, we stayed in, along with that other country. The Russians had their attempt at making a supersonic airliner, but their TU-144 could barely make it to the end of the runway without needing more fuel. The Yanks had a go as well, but they were really too ambitious. They aimed for Mach 3 and wanted to ad swinging wings and what not, but this never even made it to the production stage. Concorde was, and still is in my opinion, the greatest technological achievement in mind kinds history, and I’m not holding my breathe for something better to come along.

So why the retirement? Well, the Americans didn't help. They decided that since it wasn't an American aircraft, that it couldn't go supersonic over their country. But the crash in Paris is often seen as the fatal wound that took away many people's faith in Concorde, and I fail to see why. I mean, here we have an aircraft, that in its 30+ years of service, has never put a foot wrong. Then, one of them crashes, and it's now seen as more deadly than a nuclear holocaust. This is stupid, frankly. Dozens of 747s have crashed throughout the years, yet are we suddenly going to stop using them? No, of course we aren’t.

There are many decisions some people make that I will never understand. For example, why join the Royal Navy when you can join the Merchant Navy instead? In a choice between dying with honour and no limbs and cruising the Caribbean with no honour what so ever, I know what I’d pick. Of course, I am rather glad that other people have chosen the other. But the decision to withdraw Concorde was just abysmal. Richard Branson, bless him, tried to buy the machines to put into service with Virgin Atlantic, but the stern faced suits in charge of British Airways, said "no".

Flying in Concorde was always one of my dreams, but now it will never happen. I will be forced to ride cattle class on a 6 hour flight on a 747 instead. And while the 747 is a fine machine, it has none of the impact that Concorde had. When Concorde flew overhead, people stopped work just to see it. It was a symbol of national pride for both the UK and France. It was the way forward, a well to tell the people that the only way is forward, and Concorde would lead the way. And now it's gone forever, and have we gotten any further forward? Jeremy Clarkson said to himself as he stepped off of the last flight "This is one small step for a man, but one giant leap backwards for mind kind". Fine words Jeremy, sad words, but true words.