3 February 2017 (Friday) - Unions, Mortgages



I slept like a log; finally waking just a few minutes before the alarm was about to go off. I noticed my little dog wasn’t on the bed; is it him that gives me restless nights? I found "Furry Face TM" asleep on the sofa. He seemed content, and as I scoffed brekkie and watched the antic of Pop Larkin on the telly, so my dog snored.
I set the washing machine loose on my undercrackers, then had a quick look at the Internet. I had the usual haul of emails including Amazon trying to sell me that which I’d already bought from them, and supposedly dethroned African royalty trying to scam me.
Not a lot had happened on Facebook, and so I set off to work.

As I drove the pundits on the radio did their level best to boil my piss. They were interviewing some official or other of the rail union RMT. The RMT have been embroiled in some dispute with train operators for months and the official was furious that the dispute has been resolved without them. In fact the chap seemed determined to carry on negotiations over a problem that had been solved.
I don’t know who this bloke was, but I’d like to meet him, if only to offer a slap. In theory trade unions are a brilliant idea. In practice they attract troublemaking twits like this who clearly was more interested in the sound of his own voice than in resolving the very problems that the union was there to solve.

There was also talk about houses aren’t selling anywhere near as much as they used to. All manner of rubbish was being spouted about why houses weren’t selling. However the so-called experts were adamant that falling house sales was in no way related to house prices.
What rubbish.
When I took out my first mortgage it was standard to offer two and a half times your annual salary as a mortgage. Now it is up to five times your salary. Clearly the average man in the street can’t afford a house.

I made good time getting to work, and once there I did my thing. My Ham Street Lover moved house today; ideally I would have helped him move. But taking leave on my second week in the place seemed a little bit cheeky.
And with work done I came home via the petrol station. I have a gauge in my car which tells me how far I can go before refuelling. When I worked in Ashford I could do four hundred and twenty miles on a full tank. When I moved to Canterbury that became five hundred and twenty miles; presumably because my car is more efficient on “A” roads than it is around town. I had hoped for even more efficiency from motorway driving; but today’s refuelling gave me the same range that it always has done for the last five years.

I came home and watched an episode of The Crystal Maze. I could be wrong, but I think this episode had the worst team ever. At one point they had two team members locked in; at the end they had one crystal, and their final score was minus thirty-seven.
Oh, how I laughed…

My dog’s just been sick….

No comments:

Post a Comment