The Glidd of Glood Blog

Give me a double helping of Fat Tax

A wringing of hands on Newsnight a couple of days ago, as projections are released that show that Britain will be bankrupt by 2040. That’s pretty grim news, but it’s not like being diagnosed with terminal cancer, although all the commentators seemed to think it was. You have to get a grip. Plenty of the workforce of 2040 haven’t even been born yet, so imagining that they won’t be able to do something about the economy looks to me like defeatist rubbish.

It is sad, if not pathetic, that Britain’s leaders have no vision for the future apart from cutting costs. There was much talk of how everyone’s lives are going to be less comfortable in the future. Nigel Lawson (as if we’d be interested in hearing what the ex-flabby chancellor had to say) spoke airily of increasing the retirement age to 70, now that we are all going to live so much longer. Someone ought to tell Nigel that only politicians and journalists are still employable at 70. Try to get a job these days if you are coming up to 50 and you’ll find your CV is quickly filed vertically in the bin. So that really amounts to the government paying more unemployment benefit and less pension. I wonder where the cost saving is in that.

You could, of course, think to yourself that if the country set out to have the best education in the world, fostered entrepreneurship and created the infrastructure that the working population requires, got behind the green economy and stopped exporting all jobs to China and other far away places, the future might look very different. But bean counters always prefer the cost-cutting option because it requires no imagination or creativity. It comes as no surprise that the imagination of professional politicians, who have never done anything much apart from swim in paper, seems stretched if asked to do anything more than create a fatuous soundbite.

There was much lamenting the fact that Britain wouldn’t be able to afford the National Health Service and you can see where this one is heading. Parroting the worn-out mantra that privatisation is the saviour of all aspects of government service, politicians are slowly thinking of dismantling the thing, bit by bit, doctor by doctor. In a decade or two’s time we will be told that it just isn’t possible to maintain it and it will be replaced by some private health insurance scheme.

Governments only have one source of revenue and that’s tax, so if they are strapped for cash, there is only one place to look for it. Recent talk has centred around a possible mansion tax on the buildings of the wealthy, but frankly, that ain’t gonna change the ball game.

I have a much better idea.

If Britain is becoming increasingly obese, and the BBC says that 61% of adults and 31% of children are overweight, then the health costs engendered by fat are rising. Indeed the Beeb quotes “experts” (ah, the famous experts) who think that in 10 to 15 years, 75% of the population will suffer health problems from being overweight.

We could just roll over (ho! ho!) and let it happen, or the government could do something about it. So far, their action has amounted to telling us to eat a balanced diet and getting Jamie Oliver to try and change a few school menus. Result: diddly squat. If the problem is increasing, then their “action” must be having no effect. After all, anyone who has seriously tried to do something about their weight sees results in a few weeks, so you have to think that the nation isn’t collectively doing anything at all about its.

Let me then add my voice to the other two people who are arguing for a fat tax. The idea is laughably simple: put a tax on processed, non-healthy foods. Use the proceeds to fund the NHS. You can’t lose. If it has no effect on behaviour (unlikely) then all the people stuffing their faces with pies, cakes, biscuits, chocolate bars, crisps and Fanta will finance the treatment of the future problems that their over-eating will cause. If they change their behaviour and become thin through avoiding all the heart-clogging goodies, the government may have less of a contribution to the Health Service but will have a lot fewer patients to treat. How can this not be a good plan?

There are those who see this sort of thing as the thin end of the wedge (of pizza). Why should the government meddle in your daily life and influence what you eat? This is a facile piece of non-reasoning. The government already makes it compulsory for you to wear seatbelts and crash helmets for your own good because otherwise you’d be so stupid as not to do so. Alcohol and cigarettes, neither of which do your health any real favours, are taxed. Drugs like weed, speed, ecstasy and cocaine are banned because of the harm they are deemed to cause you.

But drug taking is small beer compared to cakes, it now appears, when it comes to the nation’s health.

You might get the impression that I don’t like cakes, biscuits and crisps. You’d be wrong, though I hardly ever buy any. There are entire supermarket aisles that I just don’t ever visit. I don’t buy them because I know that if I did, I’d get fat, and I’d sooner be a thinnish and marginally frustrated non-cake-eater than a bloated biscuit nibbler.

Whilst I was about it, I’d tax ready meals too, since then the unsatisfying and salt-laden concoctions would become even more exorbitant with the result that the nation might even start cooking again. “Oh I don’t have the time,” people wail. Not strictly true that, is it? People have the time to Twitter incessantly and be on Facebook for hours, but not to chop up an onion. Whereas, if you did chop up a couple of onions and do a wee bit of cooking, you could invite a few Facebook friends around to eat it with you and have a real conversation without saying “lol” once. Hell, you could even laugh and joke without having to type ;)

Maybe the government could go one further and actually subsidise locally grown fresh produce, though it has to be said that parsnips, carrots and cabbages (and onions) don’t actually break the bank.  It can’t be a problem of cash anyway. The reason people are fat is that they can afford to be fat. Calories are now cheap. Never have people spent so small a proportion of their income on food and they are still ballooning up.

People also like to indulge the fantasy that their size isn’t their fault. It’s glands, it’s a compensation for being miserable, it’s the pernicious advertising. It would be interesting to see how these excuses would stack up in a world where Coke cost £4 a litre (like beer).

There have been mutterings about a “Fat Tax” but if you call it that, it won’t ever happen. Fat people have a tough time as it is, they say (all 20 million of them) without taxing them into the bargain. So call it the Health Service Levy. But for God’s sake stop wringing your blubbery mitts and actually do something.

I leave you with Ricky Gervais saying what needs to be said.

  

Patient in drug bill shock

When I started this sporadic blog, people said I should do so because I was always ranting about things and they thought, I suppose, that this would be a better place for me to do it so that they wouldn’t have to listen to my criticisms. I don’t think there have been that many rants here, but then I always thought the accusations of my supposed ranting somewhat exaggerated.

That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any at all though, so here is one.

Last week, I had a very run of the mill operation on my left knee. Just a cartilage clean-up, a bit of keyhole surgery that the surgeon has performed well over a thousand times in his career. As far as I can tell, it seems to have gone swimmingly.

Before leaving hospital, I was given a prescription for a cocktail of drugs that I am to take for a week or so to ensure that everything heals up properly. These are:

• a painkiller, that I’m not taking because there is no real pain to speak of
• an analgesic that is supposed to reduce swelling
• a drug to combat the nefarious effects on my stomach of the analgesic
• an anticoagulant that ensures that I won’t develop a thrombosis in my leg as a result of the operation

I imagined that this little lot would amount to about CHF 50, say £30. Imagine my delight when I was presented with a bill for CHF 340 - that’s £240.

The breakdown of the bill is interesting:

• 2 boxes of Dafalgan painkillers, which I haven’t even opened, are a miserable CHF 3 a box: CHF 6
• 10 tablets of a generic Ponstan replacement, made by Sandoz all the same, are also CHF 6
• A tub of 50 Omezol gastric-secretion inhibitors are CHF 27 – most of which will get returned to the pharmacy
• 30 tablets of Xarelto anticoagulants (of which I actually only need to take 15) are a whopping CHF 300. That’s £208! £7 a tiny tablet.

I am wondering whether I couldn’t have just taken aspirin to replace the Xarelto. Having no knowledge of, or interest in, drugs, I imagine the answer is no, but I’ll ask my surgeon next week nonetheless.

I shall be intrigued to know just what is in the Xarelto wonder-drug, which as far as I can see, is only supposed to make my blood thinner, rather than cure cancer or AIDS. Right at the moment, until I am the wiser, this is looking like a typical pharma stitch-up. 200 quid is still a sizeable amount of cash and you can buy any amount of interesting things with it. Ending up with a small white cardboard box, half the contents of which are of no use to me, is just faintly irritating.

Naturally, I’m not really going to end up paying for much of this; my insurance company is. But this is beside the point. I have to cough up CHF 360 a month, every month, for my compulsory health insurance premiums. The insurance company is a private company that of course seeks to make a profit, and in the current economic zeitgeist, an increasing profit, every year. So you can be certain that whatever it is shelling out to the pharma companies in exchange for overpriced drugs is being passed on to us, the insured. At the end of the day, the multibillion £ or franc profits of the pharma companies are being generated by us, the ageing population.

I appreciate the old adage that pharma requires huge amounts of time and investment in blind alleys that produce nothing, in return for every single successful drug that produces a profit. And I’m not against companies making money. Maybe I am being unfair to Bayer, the makers of Xarelto. After all, last year they only turned over €36.5bn and produced a miserable €2.5bn of profit, 6.8%. Hardly enough to set the stock market alight.

But still, 200 quid for a couple of pills? Thank God I only need to have thin blood for two weeks.

 

 

Front door nears completion

The new door will soon be gracing the entrance to my house.

The mouldings have all been made, sanded to silky smoothness and some of them have been glued into position. The door itself has also been sanded down with 100, 120 and 180 grade paper to get to the same finish.

We have almost finished the interior window frame that will hold the mirror glass, but we are making it so that one side of it can be removed and the glass slid out. This will be useful in the event of my ever needing to change the glass. Should it get smashed, I won’t have to destroy my window frame to get it out. The frame will hold it in a sandwich, so if you don’t do this, there is no other way of getting to the glass once the frame has been glued together. These little modifications require some head-scratching and more valuable time, but it has to be worth it when you are making a door that you hope will last a century.

Prior to sanding, I presented the wrought ironwork to the door to see how well it fitted. The answer was perfectly, which goes to show that taking time to look after all the fractions of millimetres really comes into its own.

There is a large double knot in the lower left-side side of the exterior of the door which adds a bit of character, but it also added a hole. As is so often the case with large knots, the wood in them, growing in a different direction to the rest of the tree, is not really stable and can drop out. This had happened with one of our planks, but the position of the knot meant that we had to include it in our door anyway. The solution is to plug the hole with a piece of oak that you shape to fit snugly, and then you plane it flush with the door. It’s not invisible when you have completed this process, but it’s perfectly acceptable – not overly noticeable.

So now, apart from the window frame, there is a little bit of gluing of elements to be done and then we can start applying the oily coats and weather-proofing. This should turn the door a rich caramel colour and hopefully we can start this next week. Excitement is mounting.

The hole still needs machining for the lock, but we may to this in situ. The door is only a week away or so from its final resting place.

 

Easter Bunny comes early to Switzerland

Got to the checkout of my local Coop today and the Easter rabbits were already out in force. Switzerland prefers Easter rabbits to Easter eggs; don’t ask me why. It is all the more mysterious that the rabbits are made by Lindt, the Swiss chocolate maker, half the time yet Switzerland doesn’t actually have any wild rabbits. It’s a Swiss mystery. The rabbits could hop over from France, but they don’t. Maybe they aren’t Easter rabbits at all, but Easter hares. You can occasionally see hares in Switzerland.

It is about -10°C today with a wicked east wind. We are also in mid February and there is plenty of winter to get through yet. We could be in for some more snow soon; in fact you’d have to think that bearing in mind the time of year and the Arctic temperatures, it would be highly unlikely for there not to be some more snow this winter – perhaps even lots of it. I welcome this, as I like a proper cold winter in which you can do wintry things like huddling around log fires (I almost said “roaring” log fires but sidestepped the worst of the cliché at the last moment), skiing and drinking mulled wine.

So what’s with the early Easter bunny arrival? Easter is on April 8^th, in other words two months away. It begs all sorts of questions.

The first of these is, why are we always accelerating into the future instead of just enjoying the present? Why do we have to be fixated on spring, when we are very much in the depths of winter? It just seems redolent of constant unhappiness, a lack of satisfaction with the status quo, no matter what it is. There you are, enjoying your summer holiday and still having barbecues out in the garden when the shops get filled up with ghouls and pumpkins to prepare you for Halloween. You’ve barely digested your pumpkin and are still poking around in the forest looking for mushrooms when you are almost submerged by Christmas decorations and aggressed by perfume adverts. The tree is scarcely down when it’s all Easter rabbits.

This suggests a total lack of imagination on the part of retailers, if they can only orient their wares around pseudo religious festivals. But wait a moment. Retailers only ever do anything to make more money, so if there are lots of Easter rabbit displays two months early, then people must be buying them. You can understand that people might be persuaded to do their Christmas shopping early, not that I’ve ever met anyone who was, but surely people don’t buy their Easter eggs – or bunnies – two months in advance? Chocolate is still reasonably perishable; it’s not going to get any better in two months and it might melt. You suspect then, that the bunnies are for immediate consumption and that by beginning early, the retailers will sell lots of them in the run-up to Easter and then another heap for Easter itself. It’s the only scenario that makes any sense.

So who are the consumers of Easter bunnies, when you have entire isles groaning (another good cliché that) with bars of chocolate? There is no shortage of chocolate in this country, unsurprisingly. I can’t say that I have noticed that the chocolate in an Easter bunny tastes especially different from chocolate you can find in a chocolate bar. So you then have to think that the simple fact of pouring the chocolate into a bunny mould and covering it in gold foil does wonders for sales. It must do. Maybe this is why the Swiss don’t do Easter eggs. Perhaps the egg just doesn’t have the non-seasonal appeal of the rabbit. I find this a little strange. It always seems a bit sadistic to attack your Easter bunny, whereas who cares about an Easter egg? It’s not as if a chick was going to hatch out if it anyway.

Old joke but I still think it's hilarious.

Apple - the elephant in the room

Apple released its latest quarterly earnings report last week, which has proved to be fascinating and quite frightening reading. That’s Apple the computer-maker, right? Well not really. It is now Apple the phone-maker.

Stick the numbers in Excel, and out pops the information that in the last quarter, Apple sold 37 million iPhones generating a healthy $24bn. Yup, that’s $24bn in the last 12 weeks, or a turnover of a couple of billion dollars a week. Just in phones. In fact, iPhones made up 53% of Apple’s turnover in the last quarter, whereas Macs were a paltry 14%. So that is now 86% of Apple’s business which is not actually in what you normally think of as computers. Even the iPad contributed to 20% of the turnover, and that hadn’t even been invented a couple of years ago. To produce $9bn in three months with a product that wasn’t even available a short time ago is little short of staggering.

Add all this stuff together and Apple managed to produce a turnover of a little over $46bn (the “little” still being $333 million, just to maintain some perspective). But even better than this, they produced a net profit of $13bn. Let’s pause to consider that figure for a moment. It means that Apple is now $13bn richer than it was 3 months ago. The fact that it now sells more phones and iPads than computers doesn’t seem to be doing it any harm from any angle: gross margin has actually increased from 38.5% a year ago to 44.7%. So you’d have to think that phones and iPads make bigger margins than computers.

These would just be numbers (I suppose they are just numbers) were it not for a few interesting considerations. The first of these is that despite this gargantuan wealth and success, Apple isn’t planning, to the best of my knowledge, to hand any of it over to its shareholders in the form of a dividend. Apple has never paid one. It sits like an ogre in a cave, gloating over its treasure. What really, is the point of securing another $13bn? I suppose conservatively, Apple will amass a further $40bn over the next 12 months. What do you suppose it is going to do with it? The Apple slogan used to be “Knowledge is power”. I’m inclined to think that the unspoken slogan now is “Obscene wealth is power”. After a while, isn’t it all just a bit meaningless?

The second interesting consideration is that gross margin. At 44%, it compares somewhat favourably with the 7%-8% retail margin that Apple accords those selling its products. That’s right; when you show up and hand over $500 for an iPad after half an hour’s discussion with a knowledgeable sales person, the shop will keep about $35. It’s barely worth them talking to you. And the worst of it is, that you will go back and hassle them again, because there will be some area of your Mac, or your iPhone, or your iPad that you don’t understand and you will need a bit of professional guidance. They will try and tell you what you want to know and won’t charge you for the information in the interests of good customer relations. The shop can’t afford to hire morons, because low-IQ people would not make good employees, given the complications of the technology, so it finds itself paying competent people substandard wages for the greater glory of Apple. The shop can’t afford to pay their staff any more, Apple having given them a very small piece of their pie.

Retailers would be better off selling plates, or jeans or something less complicated where you could get cheaper less intelligent staff and still make a living margin. But Apple doesn’t really care what happens to its old retailers. For a start, the phones are sold by any electronic goods box-moving company, or by one of the phone operators. The iPads can be sold by supermarkets. Even the Macs can be sold by supermarkets. And hey, if some consumers really need some technological guidance, then Apple just opens an AppleStore and sends whatever retailers it had in the area to the wall. 

Then you also have to wonder how much Apple is paying the people who actually make their machines – mainly in China (of course). After all, if your gross margin as a manufacturer is 44%, you must be putting some serious pressure on your suppliers. And if you are selling 30 million units in 3 months, then you’d have to think that you’d have plenty of pressure to wield. If Apple doesn’t want any of its resellers to make a decent return, why would you think it would feel differently about its suppliers?

 Why even talk about Apple at all? Probably because it has always cultivated a cosy, cuddly, anti-establishment image. Remember that iconic ad that launched the Mac? Well the truth is that Apple now is Big Brother. It’s a corporate behemoth and it acts like a corporate behemoth. It uses its weight to impose itself in whatever business transaction it undertakes. It’s an amazing marketing success story – you can’t help admiring it – and the shares still seem hugely undervalued. But friendly, Apple is not. Maybe this is why the smiling Mac face logos have all disappeared from their systems and the systems are now all called after big cats: panthers, leopards, tigers, lions : killers all.

 

 

More door

So here we are, end of January and the door is not yet completed. Yes, it is taking longer than anticipated, but then I had to miss a few weeks’ lessons (knee problems). Still, progress there is and here are a few photos documenting it.

Since last update, the door has been sculpted around the edge to fit in the door frame (well, I hope it’s going to fit in the frame – that’s what all the measuring was for). I wish I could tell you how we did that, but honestly, I can’t remember exactly which machine we used. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the multi-tool bench because wandering around with the door would be something I’d remember. It weighs a ton.

Then we knocked up the central panel out of another couple of pieces of oak. Not too taxing. This has been cut to the right size. After which, it was time to turn our attention to the mouldings. You can think of these as picture frames if you like, and they go around the window and around the central panel on both sides of the door. This is where the door gets all decorative. The moulding for the central panel actually drops partly inside the lower hole, as you can see on the photos of the section. In this way there is a transition from the outer thickness of the door to the thinner panel in the middle of it. You have a certain amount of latitude as to how these mouldings are going to look, but you are constrained by the knives you have available for the multi-tool spindle shaper device. This is known in French as “la toupie” or “top”. It is essentially a spinning high-speed knife. You present your length of wood to it, and the form of the knives scoops out the shape to leave you with a moulding. You can vary the shape by raising or lowering the rotating knives and by deciding how deep you want them to cut.

To get our mouldings, we had to choose a likely piece of wood to cut the initial blanks from. We are having to husband the wood quite closely. Compared to the amount you buy initially, it is amazing how quickly it disappears when you try to make something out of it. A large quantity of it ends up as sawdust. In fact, our wood husbandry has been so important that we had to get two mouldings out of the thickness of each piece of wood. It would have been convenient to cut the thicknesses into two with the circular saw, but the width of the cut is 6mm which was considered wood we could ill-afford to lose, so Jean-David cut the blanks with the band-saw. I’d have done it myself, but I was advised that if I strayed from the line by a millimetre, I’d be shot. Using the band-saw is a slightly zen-like experience at the best of times, ensuring that you don’t deviate from the line, but I didn’t want to waste my valuable wood by making a hash of it.

Once we had the blanks, we had to cut them to the rough shape with the circular saw, then they went three times through the spindle-shaper, and were worked on once with the “défonceuse” which is hand-wielded power tool like an electric drill. The finished mouldings are then carefully measured and the ends cut at 45° to make the final frame.

So now the next job is to make the mouldings for the bigger hole on the outside and to construct the window frame to carry the mirror window on the inside. As an aside, I am pretty chuffed with the decorative effect of the wood grain. There are some real flames going up the sides of the door. Very high quality oak can be a little homogenous and uninteresting; this is not a problem I have here.

The door is edged to that it will fit flush in the doorframe

Two halves of central panel are glued together

This scrofulous-looking piece of oak is what the lower mouldings are made from

One of the mouldings prior to being cut at 45°

The finished mouldings are mounted to see if they fit. Which they do, perfectly.

Door update

Well, it looks like a door now, doesn’t it?

So what do we have here? We have the four main planks all glued together and the three cross pieces have been made. Doing the mortises and the tenons was all quite time consuming – lots of measuring, precise cutting, rounding the ends of the tenons with a file etc. What you see here are the pieces fitted together, but they haven’t been glued yet. And the perimeter of the door needs to have a 2cms groove cut around it so that it will fit flush in the door frame (my English lets me down here – don’t know the correct carpentry term for it).

Next jobs: make the groove, glue the door together, create the board that will fill in the lower hole in the door out of three pieces of thinner oak, create all the decorative mouldings, make the bit at the bottom that keeps the rain away from the inside of the house. Still plenty more to do then. And let me remind you that making doors doesn’t even count as cabinet-making; it is simple joinery. Cabinet-makers sniff at making doors.

Now that’s what I call a coat of arms

Woo-hoo! Look what I found! I got the wrought ironwork for the door back from the painters a couple of days ago. The orc-factory was even worse than the last couple of visits; the air heavy with chemical smells. So heavy, indeed, that it was almost unbreathable. I was only there for ten minutes, but how you can work there for eight hours a day I have no idea. No one seems to wear a mask, so they don’t appear overly bothered about what hideous lung diseases might be visited upon them in the future. Still, they had done a good job on the ironwork and it is now all glossy and black.

I had had the coat of arms taped over to protect it from the sand blasting as I thought I’d clean it by hand myself, seeing as some of it is beaten copper. I also didn’t want the black paint taken off it. Well, imagine my delight and surprise when I found that the “black paint” wasn’t black paint, it was just tarnish and dirt that was covering up brass. Two hours of cleaning on Christmas Day has produced what you see above. What I started with is below. I’ve always seen the door looking like this and have never cleaned it, so you can reckon that it has gone at least 10 years without a clean. I suspect though, that it has never been cleaned at all, in which case it is probably more like 30 years as that is probably when the door dates from. Hardly surprising then that it took two hours of fearsome rubbing with the magic “white stone” powder.

My new door should be finished hopefully at the end of January (can only work on it on Saturdays now) so in the meantime, I have reinstalled the ironwork on the old naff door. At least there is now somewhere to hang the Christmas wreath.

Front door - smoke and mirrors

I was advised to contact an old man you lives in the next-door village and who is an expert on wrought ironwork. Pierre Emch seems to be well over 80 and spends his days messing about in a forge making things. He looked at the photos of my wrought ironwork but told me that his forte was more the making of things rather than the paint stripping and repainting process. He advised me to visit a car body shop in Lausanne where the owner was a wrought ironwork painting genius, apparently. So I toddled off there and hung around for about 15 minutes while the proprietor finished fitting some snow wheels to a small family saloon.

We got down to business and I explained the work I required. Monsieur Ryffel told me that he would send the ironwork away to be sand-blasted and have undercoat applied and then he would finish the painting job. He estimated that the total cost would be about CHF 600 which seems like a fortune for refurbishing a smallish piece of wrought ironwork. But he told me that if I liked, I could contact the sand-blasting company Aisa in Crissier myself which would reduce some of the effort he would have to go to and consequently, the expense. This sounded like wise advice, so I scooted off to Crissier.

There was no one in the unlit reception, which was at the top of a grim flight of stairs in an industrial building, so I went in search of someone I could talk to. I found the manager in a lean-to booth in a cavernous, dark and filthy workshop. Sand-blasting and painting industrial parts is not a glamorous pastime and this place looked like a subterranean orc factory from the Lord of the Rings, the sort of place that would quickly remove your will to live if you ever had to work there. There were loud crashes and the clanking of chains, black dust coated the floor making your footsteps gritty and the air was thick with the odour of noxious solvents. However, the manager told me that yes, they could strip and paint my ironwork in a couple of days for CHF 120 with no trouble at all, so a deal was done. Quite what the Lausanne body shop thought they were going to do for CHF 600 remains a mystery, but as I don’t intend going back there, one I am unlikely to elucidate.

So the next day, I unbolted the ironwork and returned to the orcs. The door now looks even grimmer, especially as I also unscrewed the handle surrounds for refurbishment at the same time.

I also visited the famous Miroiterie du Léman which is the go-to place for mirrors and all things glass. They are able to supply what I want which comes in one single tint in one single thickness – 6mm – so there weren’t any difficult decisions to make. I handed over another CHF 120 and in a week’s time, I will be the possessor of a piece of one-way mirror.

While I was out and about, I also bought the magic Livos products I will need to oil and weatherproof the finished door. They turn out to be Linus, an undercoat especially made for oak (fortuitous that, as there don’t seem to be any products specific for any other type of wood) and a weatherproofing wood varnish called Kaldet which will finish it off.

It’s all going swimmingly. All I need now is a little more time to actually make the door.

 

Front door – eek! Woodworm!

Having cut the lengths of wood for the door, I have been putting them through the plane. This is one of my favourite bits of woodworking, as the scuzz on the planks is removed and you end up with nice smooth pieces that reveal the grain. However, they also revealed something else – in this case, traces of woodworm.

Woodworm is very common in wood but it isn’t usually too much of a problem for two reasons. The first is that the worms seem to move on quickly and no longer inhabit your wood. I’ve personally never seen a woodworm, although I’ve seen woodworm holes in umpteen pieces of furniture. The second reason is that woodworm prefer the softer sapwood and generally leave the heartwood alone. As you are throwing away the sapwood anyway (too soft for cabinet-making), it doesn’t really matter if it has holes in it.

But the oak for my front door definitely does have woodworm holes, and it shouldn’t, so I got Jean-David to phone up and complain. It sounds better coming from a professional. This wood did cost top dollar – about CHF 600 – which makes a cheap solid oak front door, but an expensive couple of planks, and there is no way it should have woodworm in it at that price. The lumber merchants agreed and offered to replace it. Fine, but I have spent 7 hours assessing it, measuring it, deciding which bits to use, sawing and planing it, which all adds up to a sizeable investment in terms of time and lessons in these particular pieces of wood. This was explained to the merchant, who has made a 25% discount of CHF 150, which is a little more than £100. Well, it’s an outcome, but it does mean that my finished oak door is going to have woodworm holes in it.

There are those who deliberately put fake woodworm holes in the furniture they make to give it an aged, authentic look, so maybe, not having to go to this trouble, I shouldn’t complain, but it is a little annoying. There isn’t that much woodworm, and what there is will be confined to the inside of the finished door. Also, this front door is not going to look out on to Eaton Terrace, Belgravia, London W1, but my veggie garden. It’s not going to be painted black and have a brass lion head knocker attached to it. So a little rustic effect isn’t really going to hurt. It’ll be a top door in any event.

I have been looking into restoring the wrought ironwork too. It appears that the coat of arms (see other photos in previous post) is in fact a piece of beaten copper and that the whole thing was made by a guy who lived down the road but who is now sadly dead. I thought about just removing the paint myself and repainting it, but I’ll have to buy paintstripper, undercoat and paint. Then what am I going to do with the paintstripper I’ve used? I can barely tip it down the drain. Frankly, with three different products to buy and an ecological headache, it barely seems worth it, so I think I shall take the ironwork to my local friendly car body shop and get them to do it. I doubt it will be much more expensive, but if it looks like it’s going to be… Then I need to contact the people to make the mirror window. It’s all go.