Monthly Archives: August 2006

General

On the Market

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Outside

So our house is definitely on the market. The agent came round and took a whole load of pictures of the house, and we signed off on the details, and the house is listed on the Richard Worth web site.

According to the details, the house is ‘immaculately presented’, which I guess is partly down to having a number of large boxes of stuff in storage, but also a large amount of work on Beth’s part keeping things in order despite my ability to pile paper all over the place. It is especially worth noting that the second bedroom actually looks like a bedroom – currently it only has one desk, one computer (the Mac of course) and currently three spare sockets!

The details were published in the middle of the afternoon, and at 5pm we had our first viewing – someone who was e-mailed the details, and immediately made an appointment.

I’ve put together the pictures from the details in a Flickr photoset if you want to take a look. The full details can be found here.

General

Good News / Bad News

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Firstly, apologies if anyone reading this knows my parents and haven’t heard what follows from them – as I’m sure you’ll understand although they have told various people, thoughts are obviously elsewhere at the moment. I guess this posting is more an effort to try and get my thoughts straight over everything, so apologies if it is a bit rambling…

Anyway, it’s strange how sometimes good news and bad news goes together. Back on Friday, when we’d decided to put our house on the market I phoned Mum and Dad to tell them the good news. However once I’d finished telling Mum, she said that she was going to call us anyway, as they had just got back from a specialist clinic in St Albans.

She explained that they hadn’t wanted to worry us up until then, but that a few weeks ago Mum had found a lump, and after their holiday had gone to see the doctor about it. He had referred Mum to the specialist clinic in St Albans. Until the visit to the clinic they weren’t sure whether it was benign lump or not, however the clinic had confirmed that it was possibly something to worry about, and today they went back for a more accurate diagnosis

Today we talked to Mum again, and she and Dad had been back up to the clinic where they had confirmed that the lump was indeed cancerous, and that they were going to operate to remove it in two weeks time, and put her on a course of radiotherapy and tamoxifen.

It’s one of these situations where in some ways you don’t expect it to happen so close to home, whilst we’ve known a number of people who have been diagnosed with cancer, it’s not the kind of thing you really ever consider happening to your parents. I guess in some ways I’m lucky to have got through 33 years without either parent getting a serious illness up to now, indeed I don’t think that either parent has even had a stay in hospital that I can remember. I guess in some ways it makes me pretty complacent, and certainly it did come as a shock. Having said that, I’m sure it still doesn’t make it any less of a shock, or any less worrying for someone whose parents have been ill before. Interestingly, on the topic of the chances of getting ill, talking to Mum she said she had filled in an online questionnaire to calculate your chances of getting cancer and it had said that she fell into the low risk category, at only 8% chance – definitely an important lesson that even if you think you are in a low risk group, you could still have problems, and it is important to get anything suspicious checked out. Better to be told that it’s benign, than to leave something.

Thankfully, the indications currently is that it has been caught early, and so there is every confidence that she will make a full recovery, certainly Mum and Dad seem positive, with Mum discussing with me whether an iPod would be a good purchase for the long hours of treatment that she will have. However it is still a worrying time for the family, and Beth and myself would appreciate it if people could remember my parents over the next few weeks as Mum goes through her treatment.

General, Politics

Pylon Blight

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Today I had one of those situations that left me feeling unavoidably bad, but there was really nothing I could do. Beth sent me a text message part way through the morning asking me to get home promptly as she had arranged a viewing of a great house in Wokingham, where the sale had fallen through, and had just come back on to the market. Apparently it had sold on the first day it came on to the market, and looking at the details I could see why. It had a double length garage, three good sized bedrooms, two reception rooms, a secluded garden, and all at a reasonable price. Looking at the pictures it looked like it was well decorated too.

Looking on the map, it was just round the corner from work, so on my lunch break I thought I’d go take a look – which is where I found the big problem – power lines. The power line that crosses this part of Wokingham goes straight over the top of the house – indeed I was quite amazed that the agent managed to get two external shots of the house without it being visible.

There has been a lot of stuff in the press about links between proximity to power lines and cancer, although it is worth stressing that the link has not been proved. However the big problem now is that according to this article from May, there is enough concern over power lines that there is consideration of banning development close to lines, a move supported by National Grid themselves. There are a couple of options of how this would work in practice, one would be to purchase all existing property close to lines that wouldn’t meet the new regulations. However the other, much cheaper option, is more of a concern for buying a property like this one. The planning regulations would be changed to ban new developments – but do nothing about existing property. Whilst it saves the government and National Grid a lot of money not buying all the existing properites, owners of those properties would find that the value of their property would plummet overnight, as the planning decision would all but confirm to most people that living close to a power line is dangerous. This would blight thousands of properties across the UK, knocking an estimated £7bn of property prices.

Anyway, after thinking about it for a bit, I asked Beth to cancel the appointment. She was all for going to look at it anyway, as we had agreed a time. But ultimately, since I don’t want to buy a property that could have thousands wiped off the value in a few months or years, I wouldn’t consider buying this house however good the house itself is. Whilst I feel exceptionally sorry for the people who own the house currently, and who have obviously spent a lot of time on decorating and refurbishing it, I thought it would be cruel to go and view the house when I have no intention of buying it.

Having said that, the exercise has been worthwhile, as the article lists the currently proposed distances from power lines, which especially around here could blight a significant number of houses, particularly large parts of Penrose Park, parts of the new Poppyfields development, and a number of other otherwise desirable properties in the area. Certainly double checking the locations of houses on an Ordnance Survey map, which shows power lines would be a worthwhile exercise.

The BBC also has an informative Question and Answer page on the British Medical Journal study linking proximity to power lines with childhood leukaemia. The study suggested that those living within 200m of power lines had a 70% higher risk than those more than 600m away.

Incidentally, the picture above was taken by Donovan Hide, and isn’t of the house in question.

General, Pictures, Transport

Flickr Coincidence

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The Devon Belle

One of the fun side effects of having your pictures on Flickr is when total strangers find something they like and comment on one of your pictures.

I’ve had one such comment recently on this picture that I took of the Devon Belle observation car, which runs on the Paignton and Dartmouth Steam Railway that we rode on last week. The comment was from obcar13, a railway enthusiast who lives in Insch in the north of Scotland – about as far away from Devon as you could get, saying that coincidentally he’d just finished uploading a picture of a model of the very same car (pictured here) and how great it was to see the same car still running years later.

The car was originally built to form part of the Pullman Devon Belle express that ran from Waterloo to Ilfracombe between 1947 and 1954. However looking at further pictures in obcar13‘s photoset it seems the car then spent part of the remaining time before it went into preservation, running in Scotland!

I’m guessing that he hasn’t ever been down to the Paignton and Dartmouth Railway however from his comment he certainly seems to get a kick out of the fact that the car that he remembers riding in on a family outing back in the sixties was still giving good service down in Devon.