Jonathan Riddell's Diary

My previous grumpy blog post about property agents who don’t maintain the property they rent out got me a phone call from Click Let.  Weird how a Twitter post will get more of a response then a year’s worth of e-mails.  Was he calling to propose helping with maintaining the property we share? Of course not, he was complaining that I had said they were happy to rent out a property they know doesn’t meet the legal standard.  He said the people living upstairs would fix it.  Or the council.  Or someone else.  But not him.  Which rather confirms what I said.

Weirdly the Click Let man even reported himself to The Scottish Association of Landlords who of course said it was fine not to inspect the property and the repairing standard doesn’t apply to roofs (because the tenant doesn’t have access to them allegedly even though they do if they bother to walk up to it).   Which confirms my fears that this is an industry wide problem where a sense of self entitlement means these companies (like the landlords themselves) consider maintaining the building to be outwith their duties.  So as I say, perfectly happy to rent out buildings regardless of the state they are in.

One of my more useful neighbours has organised some repairs on the roof and the roofers pointed out some crumbling stone that needed further repairs.  The council sent round someone who told me the same a decade ago and with scaffold up it seemed like a chance not to be missed to get them done easily.  I set up a poll of neighbours and asked them to vote on whether they agreed. Slowly votes came in from neighbours but not the majority needed.  Annoyingly the landlord registration doesn’t have useful stuff like phone numbers, I tried to search for some in the phone book and even facebook but without luck.  One of the neighbours we’d never heard from had started renting out their property but of course we’d never heard from him or his agent Grant Propetry.

I called Grant Property but was told the person in charge of repairs was busy and would call me back.  He didn’t so I called him again and hassled him about getting a vote on the question.  He said I shouldn’t hassle him because he was “trying to help me” which showed a complete misunderstanding of the situation.  I was offering to do his job for him and he was blocking me but he thought he was helping me.  Incredible.

He sent an e-mail about being unable to do anything if the landlord doesn’t instruct him and that’s all we heard from.  I did eventually get the vote needed for a majority to be able to go ahead with the works but I’m so saddened and disappointed at yet more people who don’t want to look after their property or the property they rent out and just treat it as a bank account.

Lessons:

• the repairing standard needs clarified to ensure the roof is included for everyone (which I’m sceptical is not the case already)
• agents complain when you say they are happy not to have responsibility but then claim they have no responsibility.  insane.
• agents respond more to an unfavourable Twitter post than they do a direct e-mail.  it makes you mad.

Many years ago in a move I’m very proud of him for my dad worked with some useful people and organised the dredging of Lochrin Basin at the end of the union canal in Edinburgh.  That then became the home of Forth Canoe club for twenty years during which time hundreds of people were introduced to this fun sport and we made world champion paddlers and Olympiads. After 20 years the rest of the world caught up to the idea that canal regeneration might be a nice idea which would improve the space people live and play in and the millenium project dredged the canal from Edinburgh to Glasgow.  To pay for this British Waterways kicked Forth Canoe Club out of its buildings and replaced one of the best community assets in Edinburgh with tall ugly buildings.

Forth CC’s buildings bulldozed and tall soulless buildings bring constructed.

BW gave Forth a shed further along the canal at Harrison Park.  It’s very picturesque but it’s 1/5th the size we had before and incredibly they built a wall in the middle of the building along its length to take away a further 2/5ths of that building.  No explanation was given for it but it might have been a walkway to let narrow boaters walk through or it might have been because the wall behind the building was collapsing and BW didn’t want the hassle of fixing it.

Back in 2011 (I think) the city council had a couple of employees who organised a meeting about a canal strategy. It’s the sort of well meaning but mostly unhelpful exercise.  The one ended up with an over-designed PDF that is was large to put on their CMS for several weeks and is now too large for me to want to download and read through.  The consultation was limited to a few meetings which were not well advertised and didn’t use any modern tools like web forums to allow a longer discussion to happen.  Ultimately there’s no money for anything so any nice ideas that did come out of it didn’t happen.

Anyway at this meeting I did manage to ask staff of what was to become a rebranded and devolved quango Scottish Canals whyever they blocked off two fifths of our boathouse.  They came and looked at the boathouse and wondered themselves whyever this happened, clearly whatever original purpose the internal wall had was long since forgotten as civil service office staff move around. A further meeting happened where I was given keys to the corridor but it turned out it was being used as a storage dump by our next door neighbour.  We could share the space the civil servants suggested.  I spent the next few months doing up the corridor around the neighbour’s old rowing boat.  I was told off for moving the rowing boat out of the corridor even though I needed to do this to fix the damage that had been caused by Scottish Canals’ neglect.  One day a lease arrived without warning or explanation in the post. Someone in Scottish Canals had presumably worked out they should support a nice community group making use of the canal not a neighbour who didn’t.  A victory.  But the building is still too small to do what we used to do.

Every time I met with Scottish Canals they wondered if we could move the canoe club to be with the rowing club at Meggetland or maybe at Wester Hails.  I was interested in the idea of a new building with the rowing club at Meggetland and had a few meetings with them about it but the canal is barely wide enough for one rowing boat never mind rowing boats with canoes circling around them so I decided to drop the idea.  I told Scottish Canals I was never interested in moving to Wester Hails at the edge of town, Forth CC works as well as it does because we’re close to the city centre where everyone can get to.  At the launch of the canal strategy, which despite starting canal redevelopment Forth was never invited to, Scottish Canals gave away why they were so interested in us moving out of town.  STV covered them in January 2012 saying

“At Harrison Park, if the Forth Canoe Club relocate to Hailes Park, Harrison Park could become a new focus for residential moorings.”

So for the second time Forth had the prospect of having its buildings bulldozed, quite galling considering what we have done to bring life to the area.  I told them we were not going to move out of the city centre and told the “canal champion” Tim McKay the same and the idea of barges at Harrison Park was quietly dropped.

In February 2012 I went to a meeting of a new community group.  The old brewery at Fountainbridge had been sold to the Bank of Scotland to make a soulless headquarters but the financial crash stopped that happening and a large brownfield site was then bought by the City Council for a new buliding for Boroughmuir school. The Fountainbridge Canalside Initiative was a group of people who thought they should come up with ideas for what to build on the rest of the land before developers come along with more soulless ideas.

I noticed a plot at one end of the site which seemed to be going spare, I wondered if it would be suitable for a new boathouse for Forth which would give us the space we badly needed.

So I set about searching for politicians to help find out if it was a good idea.  Lib Dem councillor Jim Lowrie invited me into his plush office in the City Chambers in the High Street and seemed very interested in the idea.  He said to give him a couple weeks and he’d set up a meeting with the relevant civil servants.  This guy was the planning convener as well as councillor for Fountainbridge so he should know about the plot.  Weeks went by and e-mails I sent went unanswered.  Then an election was on and his leaflets included that he had canal improvements on track including “new premises for Forth Canoe Club”.  Except he was the one blocking any progress by not organising the meeting he had promised me.  I think the real reason for the downfall of the Lib Dems isn’t Nick Clegg but is Jim Lowrie, the other points mentioned on this leaflet weren’t true either.

Jim Lowrie lies about helping Forth Canoe Club. A Google search for his name says “Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe” which makes me wonder what else he is hiding.

After the election there was a new bunch of councillors to deal with.  But councillors have surgeries where they sit around in a library for an hour hoping someone turns up.  If someone does it’s usually somebody moaning about life.  They’re usually very happy to have someone turn up who had a helpful and realistic idea.  Except for some reason the councillors with the weird title of “canal champion”.  Tim McKey is in the election leaflet above and when I went to see him he kept saying I should go back to my local councillor, but I’m sure Scottish Canals don’t have to go to their local councillor.  I went to see Gordon Munro who got the title after the election but he had a ward in Leith many miles away from the canal and only said he “believed he had that remit” which seems like a failed setup by someone.

However Andrew Burns is my local councillor and also leader of the council.  He did organise a meeting with the relevant civil servants from sports and the education department who owned the land.  At the meeting the education dept said they were going to build part of the school on the land and were puzzled why we thought we could use it. They said there might be scope to get the building designed with a canoe club in it if we paid millions of pounds for the privilege.  There was no consideration that the school, despite being 1.5 hectares under the regulation size and wouldn’t have enough space for decent sports facilities would want to use the obvious facility on their doorstep, the canal.  Lesson being: politicians talk the talk but for results get to the civil servants fast to work out what’s really going on.  So the end of that idea. Or was it?

By 2013 there was a meeting set up called the Canal Sounding Board to discuss plans for the old brewery site at Fountainbridge which had land-owners, Scottish Canals, the local community group Fountainbridge Canalside Initiative, politicians and civil servants there.  The plans for the school had changed and the plot was no longer going to be used for a school building.  Could Forth get a building on there instead?  I sounded out some councillors and it seemed a possibility with initial plans for the school now showing a pavilion building on the land I had in mind.  Some queried where the money would come from and I said I hadn’t thought about it since I didn’t even know if the idea was at all possible but we had a track record of getting grants.  There was a consultation on plans for the school and parents who were in the club pointed out that using the canal as a sports facility seemed the obvious thing to do on a site short of sports facilities.  At the next sounding board meeting the plans for the school were revealed.  They included an enlarged playground with a garden area in it.  To compensate the proposed pavilion building in the public park was taken away.  The desire to support canoeing at the school was not relevant as it wasn’t on the syllabus said the plan.

Which brought an end to the idea.  It wasn’t a perfect idea anyway, the canal there is too narrow (although it also narrows on our current site) and it’s on the other side so the towpath would be in the way.  And it would have been a lot of work to fundraise and build the building so I wasn’t interested unless all the pieces fell into place.  Here it was just ignored by the people who could have made it happen, the education department.  It’s a small site and they have lots of competing demands just to get the school built but it’s a shame the government’s desire for active schools is ignored here.

And the current boathouse?  A wall fell down elsewhere in Edinburgh killing someone and suddenly Scottish Canals remembered the one they had neglected to have fixed for a decade and their lawyers sent us a letter to leave the building.  That’s a story for another day…

The new Park, no space for a boathouse but somehow an outdoor gym came on the plans, why do civil servants come up with random ideas and not listen to the ones people want?

I made the tars for Plasma 5.2.2 yesterday.  I use releaseme, the nice program by KDE hero Harald Sitter.  Previously this took over 4 hours to make all 35 tars now it takes about 1 hour, lovely.  Most of the time is checking out the translations which, to make life simpler for translators, are in a separate Subversion archive.  The update Harald did now was to allow multiple checkouts, lovely.  And with the docs people helping out too we have translations of documentation, Brazil is far ahead in its translations here.

The result was there was time in the day after running it to ponder improving the Plasma specific parts of the scripts so I added automation of a few bits to ensure consistency and make the process smoother.  Making the announcement webpages for bugfix releases is now mostly automatic.  Updating individual tars when problems are found it too.  I finally got round to scripting updates to the version numbers in Bugzilla, it’s crazy there is no API for this. I borrowed Albert’s script for KDE Applications to make better full changelog pages.  And I added some QA tests so I can check if there’s anything missing which should be there.   It was quite a satisfying afternoon.

Now I just need to automate the announcements and the second half of the process will be easy too 🙂

The amazing Scarlett is busy building them for Kubuntu now

I’m reading Lesley Riddoch’s book Blossom which is about her experiences of Scottish democracy and it has an excellent chapter on tenements.  These medium density homes, which make up much of Scottish city housing, create community by forcing people to live together but don’t create ghettos in the way that high density housing of 60s and 70s housing schemes do.  They mean that people live close enough together it is often practical and indeed the easiest form of transport to walk or cycle around town.  They allow for on-street shops.  They are also weirdly rare in England and fail to feature in most modern developments where people prefer houses which take up more land and need cars to me useful.

I love the flat I own in a tenement in Polwarth in Edinburgh for all these reasons, but I continue to be saddened and annoyed by the number of people who rent them out, treating them as a bank account which doesn’t need any maintenance.  It doesn’t occur to these landlords that they have chosen to take on a job which needs active involvement.  And then there’s the agents who are happy to rent out these properties, taking their cut while knowing there is maintenance needing done they don’t get around to helping with.  Today’s grumpy blog post focuses on the agents.

Recently I got into a heated discussion about canoe politics.  Some slalomists had put in motions to get more money from the national association.  They ended up being defeated (if they money doesn’t exist it doesn’t make much sense to requite it to appear) and the slalomist on the board was voted off in favour of a marthon paddler. At the end the guy who had lead much of the online discussion, Stewart, posted a link to a news article about the marathon paddler going to court.  This was a very petty way to treat the losing of an argument and I said so, pointing out it was irrelevant and that he ran an estate agents who were renting out a flat in my tenement while not helping out with any of the repairs needed.  The property has leaks and as I wrote in my previous grumpy blog post it has damp which needs fixed.

Stewart said he would be happy to know of any problems so I added him to the e-mails with the other neighbours.  After some further exchanges among my neighbours about the repairs he asked for his staff member to be added to the e-mails, a chap called Kjartan who had previously ignored any call for help with repairs or stairwell meetings.  Kjartan ignored the issue of course and eventually I had to point out what needed doing, call some contractors, convince enough people to agree, organise the repairs, collect the money.  Kjartan kept giving vauge excuses why that wasn’t enough and when I keep pressing to point out it was his job to make it enough he ended up quoting the Tenement Act 2004 to say why the responsibility was all from his client landlord and not his.

So finally after a year of being stonewalled by Click-Let I got an assurance that indeed they were happy to rent out property, knowing it doesn’t meet The Repairing Standard which is the legal requirement for rentals.  They consider it entirely their landlord client’s problem and they are probably right.

But as I wrote about before the landlords are happy to let long term problems slide just expecting someone else to fix them.  And the tenants go along with this too because it’s not worth the hassle to give them grief or take them to a tribunal, in the worst case they can move out.

Solutions?

It needs some legislative fixes to let this tragedy of the commons be fixed:

• Alter the Tenements Act to make property agents joint liable with owners in meeting The Repairing Standard.  They make lots of money doing nothing economically productive, they should at least be responsible when doing it.
• The Tenements Act to be altered to make landlords and agents liable for repairs to owners of other flats in the stair as well as their tenants.  Tenements need everyone to look after each other but for some reason the law doesn’t reflect this.
• The fit and proper test for landlords and agents to be defined and monitored and for them to be struck off the registrar when they don’t meet it
• The landlord’s register to require an active e-mail address for all landlords as well as their agents.
• Nobody to be allowed on the landlord register without first answering a questionnaire about what monitoring and maintenance they have done and will continue to do
• It to be illegal to sell an inhabited tenement which does not meet The Repairing Standard
• House surveys need to actually inspect the whole building.  The one I read for the tenement which got sold in my previous grumpy blog post said they surveyor had looked at it through binoculars which isn’t going to tell you anything useful.

The council needs to write to every landlord and agent reminding them of their duties.  And the same to the decreasing numbers of owner-occupiers.  It needs to dispell myths like ground floor flats not being responsible for maintaining the stairwell.

Landlord Accreditation Scotland are supposed to ensure landlords follow best practice.  They need to ensure that their agents maintain the properties they rent out.

Only with these changes will we be able to ensure properties like mine get their owners to work together towards maintenance and we can see an end to the sort of tragedy which saw Illegal Jacks restaurant close down.

Amazingly one of the other owner occupiers in the stair has contacted a roofing company and it seems like we may actually get some of the repairs done.  No thanks to Click-Let who are happy to take in money while problems go unfixed.

 

The Problem

Regular readers will know of my problems with maintaining my property in Edinburgh. It’s a tenement flat building with 11 owners who all need to jointly maintain the communal areas. The problem is nobody except me does, maybe I’m unique in wanting to maintain the most expensive thing I own but only I so much as looks at the roof never mind maintain it.

This year one of the owners, Charles Lovatt, did organise a meeting of all the owners to discuss repairs needing done.  I say organise, it came down to me to point out what his job was and to set up the modern tools like Doodle which make these things possible and set up times and places.

We met and I had to show everyone where the problems were.  When we went into the attic half the owners stayed out and didn’t want to look.  When we were looking for broken tiles on the roof Charles was too scared to even walk near the edge.  When we were looking at leaks in the attic only 1 other person accompanied me to walk around it and look.  When I asked about who put down the mysterious plastic sheeting that was prolonging the damp problems or the even more mysterious insulation that was stopping ventilation issues nobody said anything.  Nobody seemed at all annoyed or amazed that random stuff had appeared in the attic causing thousands of pounds worth of damage which nobody knew about.

But we drew up a list of issues to be fixed and Charles noted it all down and we went away to communicate over e-mail.  But Charles didn’t get back to us.  I waited and enquired and he said he was working on writing it up.  I waited some more and enquired and he e-mailed to say he was having problems with his e-mail, a worse lie I can’t imagine.  After waiting in vain some more I went ahead and make a shared document which listed all the items we agreed and sent out an e-mail asking people to organise the repairs.

Of course nobody did.  But I contacted some repair companies and as is usual in these things they need chased up and you need to make some visits and arrange to be at home to show them around.  I got agreement from a majority of owners and told the repair companies to go ahead, which as is expected with these companies needs some chasing up.

Some of these are ongoing and some have been completed.  But now Charles has said he doesn’t want to be included in any of the e-mails discussing it because he’s sold the flat.  Why is it acceptable to sell property knowing it does not meet The Repairing Standard, the legal standard for property rental? Why does nobody else help in any way to repair their property or seem at all concerned or annoyed that nobody else is helping? Yes it’s some some mild bother and yes you need to be persistent to deal with the repair companies but that is the job they have taken on as landlords or the responsibility they have taken on as property owners with a shared building.  Several people have started paying me for the repairs before I have even asked them to, but nobody has started doing any of the organising needed.

The Cause

What is going on here?

One issue is people have grown up without a sense of community, nobody likes to talk to their neighbour or share the gossip which starts the sort of conversations happening to discuss these problems.

Another is there are a large number of middle class middle aged people who having worked hard to pay off their mortgage were able to take advantage of the insane rise in house prices in the years until 2008.  These people bought multiple flats to rent them out and assumed they would pay for themselves, that it was an easy way to make money and allow for an easy retirement.  You can’t blame people for taking advantage of a system I suppose, even if it does result in anyone under the age of 35 being unable to get a property without help, why no politicians are concerned about this is a constant source of annoyance to me.  Anyway these landlords tend to treat their properties as a savings account not a job and don’t bother with maintenance and assume someone else will.  They have plenty of money so they’re typically happy to pay someone else to do it but they don’t feel the need to do it themselves because they’re above such menial tasks.

Which bring me to the third reason, people don’t have the practical skills to maintain the property they own. When I bought my first house the first thing I did was go into the attic and scout around the roof, it was fun as well as normal to be.  When I saw a problem I enjoyed working out how to fix it. When it needed a professional I phoned up the companies to organise them and I kept phoning them when they did the usual practice of forgetting to get back to me.  Maybe I’m unusual, my dad also loves doing this stuff so maybe I just learnt it off him and got the required help when I got stuck.  But it doesn’t say much for society that people are unable to make a few phone calls.

So when I put “property shark” in the blog post title that’s just being provocative because I’m feeling grumpy, I don’t think Charles Lovett is a malicious property shark, I think he’s just a lazy middle aged middle class baby boomer with a sense of self entitlement.  He ran a company LI Components doing electronics and at some point realised it was more profitable to rent out a flat which was done under the ownership of that company presumably so he didn’t have to pay Income Tax on it. Until the crisis came and it stopped increasing in value every year and a neighbout (me) pointed out how he was failing in his job so rather than fixing it he sold it and ran away.  This government press release describes his “interests… include strategy, entrepreneurial marketing and the competitive advantage arising from good governance” but if he isn’t able to call a plumber  I don’t see why he’s suitable to run a quango.

The amazing thing is Charles and Brian are just the worst example I’ve had to deal with because they ran away.  The rest of my neighbours are no help either.  They are usually happy to pay, some do so without me even asking presumably to ease their guilt.  But they don’t help and they don’t seem to understand the need to help.

The Solution

How to fix this?

Edinburgh Council wants to restart the statutory repairs scheme where they just made repairs.  When this was done previous it ended up with corruption because none of the owners of properties they were repairing cared enough to check up on what as happening.  So I don’t think it’s a good idea to start that again.

I tried to sue the previous landlord who failed to help or pay but lost.  Although he has a legal duty to his tenant to keep the property in good order he has no duty to his neighbours, and tenants are often just as lazy and ignorant as the owners.  Enacting a duty to your neighbours to maintain communal property would solve this in a stroke.

Education and communication would help.  E-mailing the landlord registration database to remind everyone of their job and doing a mass leaflet campaign would help. Maybe the council could send round the contact details of all the owners of neighbouring properties.

You already need to register to be a landlord.  Enforcing this would be a good idea as there are at least two flats in my stairwell which are let out but are not on the registrar.  And doing some sort of test for people registering should be required. “Have you checked the roof is not leaking?” would be perfect.  “What have you repaired in the last decade?” would be spot on.

And y’know, maybe the government could make property not a profitable way to get a pension and make it affordable to people under 35.  Higher stamp duty is a start.  More social housing might help.  Higher bands for council tax may help.  It probably wouldn’t help the politicians win votes with middle aged people but it would be the right thing to do after decades of transferring wealth from the young to the old.

 

Today I voted in the Catalunya independence voluntary non-binding consultation and I voted Si Si.

I had been unsure what to vote and have spoken to many people to try to work out what is best.  As I said in my previous post on the topic  I was unsure on the question because unlike the Scotland referendum it seemed to be all about national identity and money rather than political differences.  There are very strong passions here on the topic, just read the 20+ comments on my post above and compare it to my post on Scotland  which got zero comments.  Unfortunately most of the comments are again about national identity, quibbing about whether Catalunya was ever independent from Spain or not, which is really just ancient history.

Several people objected, quite rightly, to the comment about Andaluthians working only in the summer and claiming benefits the rest of the year, but this wasn’t my comment it was what several Catalan people had told me when I asked why I should vote Si.  This is the sort of nationalism that is a bit scary and objectionable.  When I asked at the rally before the vote the lady told me the reasons for voting yes were because she could not speak Catalan in school in the 70s and they gave away all the money to the rest of Spain.  There will be some truth in that but that can also an unhealthy sort of nationalism.  And it’s hardly a reason for me to vote yes since I don’t speak Catalan and I don’t pay taxes here.

So why vote yes?  I finally found someone who gave me some political reasons.  The Catalan government wanted to impose a transaction tax on banks to help pay for the crisis they caused, but this was rejected by Madrid.  They wanted to ban electricity companies from cutting off customers who could not pay, also rejected by Madrid.  Catalunya wanted to prevent banks repossessing  your home because you could not pay for your mortgage but that was rejected.  There is a plan for a Mediterranean Railway Corridor which would connect Medierranian ports with the rest of Europe by rail but the Spanish government insists it needs to go to Madrid rather than Barcelona.  Similarly the half public half private company which owns both Barcelona and Madrid airports keeps stopping new Barcelona routes and making them go to Madrid.  And then there are detention centres for immigrants which the Catalan government wanted to shut down but could not.

And the politics of Spain doesn’t get any more friendly.  There are reports of Catalan friendly judges being followed by the central police and the Catalan president is being prosecuted for running the referendum.

And there’s my personal experience of government here, I’ve been welcomed by the Generalitat when I registered to live here but both me and my girlfriend have been completely unable to get an ID number from the bureaucratic Spanish government needed to work and pay taxes.  So I don’t pay taxes to Spain.  No wonder they’re in crisis.

None of this matters much, most people didn’t even know the vote was ongoing (finishes tonight, 25th November).  And I nearly voted no at the last minute when a TV crew interviewed me to ask why I was voting when I wasn’t Catalunyan.  So I voted yes in the hope of becoming a Catalan in a new state.  Good luck.

Copied over from the previous version of my website..

According to Google, there is no reference to Ratchet Screwdriver,
the legendary game played by young
Quakers the world over (and, as far as I can tell, nobody else).
How it can be that Quakers from Edinburgh to California all play the
same game without ever having met is a remarkable achievement of
nature of proportions similar to the the near identical shapes of
sharks and dolphins despite their evolutionary separation.

Some people mistake Ratchet Screwdriver as being violent. Some
people mistake it as being rather too intimate. Technically it is
both of these but mostly it’s just great fun.

Ratchet Screwdriver was banned by BYM’s Children’s and Young
Person’s Committee. There is no way of knowing when this happened or
who was consulted about the forced destruction of our heritage because
BYM’s committees do not make their minutes generally available.
However an explanation can be found at this
thread on u19s qboard (search for `co-clerks’). An anonymous reply explains the fault in
their logic:

Unfortunately what you have done is to drive it underground, to make
it more popular than ever. Meaning it now happens without proper
supervision, it has become something cooler.

The first rule of Ratchet Screwdriver is: don’t talk about
Ratchet Screwdriver.

The Game

First, remove all footwear, jewelry, watches, and especially
glasses. I’ve never known a pair of glasses to come out of Ratchet
Screwdriver intact.

Ratchet Screwdriver requires an odd number of people to play,
usually numbering at least 11. One person sits on their own while the others
pair up and sit in a circle one member of the pair behind the other.
Those sitting behind their partner may not touch the person infront,
but can otherwise sit as closely as possible.

One player sits on their own, the others sit in pairs one behind the
other

The odd one out calls the names of two people sitting in the front,
and those two people must compete to be the first to kiss the odd one
out. The partners of the two that were called have to hold them
back.

The one who kisses the caller first is the winner and now sits
behind the person they managed to reach, the partner they left behind
becomes the new odd one out. The other pair swap places to let the
person at the back have a chance at the front.

Oh the questions

But where did this game come from? Why is it thus called Will CYPC
see the error of their ways? If you have the answers to any of these,
any more interesting nuggets of information or tales of Ratchet
Screwdriver please do e-mail me.

And apparently some of them call it wink. That
page explains it quite well.

Recently I had the privilege of meeting Marc Van Der HS (or as I like to call him, Marco Polo, because everyone here is called either Marc or Jordi) in Barcelona. Despite this being a prosperous city on the sea front where people do a range of sports from bike polo to long boarding there’s only him doing canoe polo. So we do training a couple of times a week in Port Olympic. There’s a limited amount you can do with two people and no goals in what should be a game with two teams of five people but Marc has found a range of useful exercises to do. Here’s some of them for my own notes and anyone else who’s interested.

Warm up:

• Paddle forwards over a length about 50m long
• Paddle backwards over the length
• Paddle forwards dipping the nose on each paddle stroke
• Paddle touching your blade onto the sterm of your boat with each stroke
• Paddle with a bow rudder on each stroke so you zig-zag
• Slide the paddle so your hands are at the extreme left and right of the shaft and you are paddling with an extended shaft on each stroke

Ball thowing on the move, paddle side-by-side over a length of about 50m

• Throw a ball to each other while paddling infront of the partner’s boat
• Throw a ball to your partner’s body
• Throw ball to the front of your partner’s boat so they can bat it forwards with their paddle blade
• Before each throw do a fake throw forwards, for bonus points don’t look at your partner

Passing between two people

• Pass with two hands facing each other
• Pass with two hands throwing the ball up in the air, the thrower should keep eye contact on the person they are throwing to
• Pass with 1 hand from right hand to right hand or left hand to left hand, the elbow should be kept high and the ball should be thrown above the head, use the middle and ring finger to throw, rotate the shoulder backwards
• Same thing up in the air
• Passing over a long distance
• Passing sideways while boats are parallel to each other
• Pass to your partner’s paddle blade on the left and right sides
• Pass above your partner’s head to catch with paddle blade
• Pass to the front of your partner’s boat to be caught with paddle blade

Series

• Paddle forward gently, one person shouting “go” means you do two paddle strokes forward hard
• Ten strong strokes followed by ten short strokes

Other Bits

• timed races zig-zagging over a floating chain
• piggy in the middle with one person in the middle and three others all of who’s boats must touch the centre boat
• with helmets: two boats next to each other parallel, one person uses a strong reverse sweet and edge to slide the tail of their boat under their partner’s then paddle back some strokes
• play defence/attack where one person tries to get the ball from another person
• do short laps with a 180 degree turn at each end, on the turn move both hands to the end of the paddle blade so you have an extended paddle shaft, use a reverse sweet and edge away from the paddle side to raise the front of the boat

Next month Scotland has a referendum in whether to be an independent country. Here are the main reasons why I expect to vote Yes..

Staying United and Reducing Government

All countries need to work with their neighbours, when Europe was a patchwork of protectionist countries that like to have random wars with its neighbours life was tricky. Scotland was poor 300 years ago so when the country finally went bust it took the best opportunity on offer and had a union with England which while still having random wars with its neighbours had its own empire to work with other countries through (either on friendly or less friendly terms). Now life has moved on and we need bigger more fair unions to sort out the boring stuff like free movement of people and trade. That’s the founding purpose of the EU and while it has its problems with lack of accountability and political messups like allowing Greece to join the Euro it has overall succeeded brilliantly. We have no need for a union with Wales, a random corner of Ireland and little Englanders when we can have a much larger union as part of the EU. The UK is simply a layer of government I feel no need of. Best to simplify it by having three layers of government (local, national and international) than four (local, national, another definition of national and international).

An independent Scotland will be more democratic. Where the borders of government are made is arbitrary circles on a map but there is a clear demos in Scotland which we don’t share with England (and even less with Northern Ireland). The two parties that make up the UK government are the least popular parties in Scotland while the majority government in Scotland has a tiny representation in the UK and a whole government department (Scotland Office) with nothing better to do than work against the democratic process of Scotland.

And the scare stories?

What currency will we use? Although it’s not fashionable to say so now I’d like to move to the Euro, it’s been broken by politicians fudging the rules of entry to let in various countries that then messed up. But it seems to be healing and given a cautious approach there’s no reason not to join. Except we can’t because we use Sterling and before any country joins the Euro you’d need to peg your currency with it which the UK doesn’t want to do. Using Sterling makes sense, if the rUK government don’t want to have an agreement to use it then Scotland can just use it anyway just like the Isle of Man or Channel Islands do and just like Ireland did when it became independent, and if rUK insists that it somehow gets rights over Sterling which Scotland doesn’t then fine, they’ll be dumped with the national debt.

Will Scotland be allowed to join Europe? Scotland is already part of Europe so there’s nothing to join, no part of the European treaties allows for European citizens to be kicked out of the EU. There’s again no reason why the rUK gets to claim it is different from Scotland, just because they’re bigger doesn’t mean they get free entry into the EU while Scotland doesn’t. The biggest threat to being in the EU is England’s Tories giving a referendum to leave the EU, now that scares me.

And other issues? How will the BBC be split up? Will Royal Mail continue to operate cross border? Will mobile phones work cross border? Maybe I’d being naive but I trust our MPs at Westminster such as Danny Alexander and Alistair Carmichael to negotiate for their constituents in Scotland and not against their interests. If they negotiate against Scotland’s interests then that in itself is a pretty good argument for dissolving the UK.