Heritage DIY

Over the past few days, BH and I have been taking lessons, usually on a one-to-one basis, with our new television, and I think it fair to say that we are making progress. BH has the advantage that she has far more experience of remote controllers than I do, while I have the advantage that the interface has become a lot more like that on a computer, on a laptop, of which she has little experience. She does, however, retain her rôle as Device Controller.

Along the way we have now become subscribers to both ITV Hub and Britbox, each at around £5 a month, and which I currently believe to be different, if overlapping offerings. We can now reach back into the mists of time for heritage crime dramas. Thinking of the gritty - not to say sweaty - crime dramas that we (don't) get now on terrestrial on and after 21:00, I associate to BH's parents who liked Morecambe & Wise (whom I disliked) because it was both cleverly done and inconsequential. There was quite enough real life out in the real world and one did not need it for relaxation in the evenings.

But it was all rather tiring and it was a relief to tackle a bit of heritage DIY. The occasion being the arrival of some roof insulation rolls and the need to illuminate their installation. There is light up there, but it does not reach much further than the boarded fraction. So after poking around in the garage for a bit, I came up with the contraption above. Luckily BH was able to come up with a bayonet light bulb - without which a lot of the electrical fittings held in the garage would have been useless.

Slightly annoyed now that I did not trouble to get the socket in the middle of the board, but otherwise it is quite satisfactory. With the point of the undulations being to stop the flex being yanked out of the bottom of the light fitting. A flex which must have been cut off a relatively modern appliance, having one of those plugs into which the flex is, as it were, hard wired. Not like the plugs of old at all, with their little strips of fibre board screwed down to hold the flex in place.

PS 1: I now know from Littré that rôles were originally the rolls of parchment on which our kings and queens - and French kings and queens - kept their records. The National Archives has lots of them. The present uses of the word by theatrical and HR people came later. Perhaps later on I shall check whether it is the same story in OED.

PS 2: one used to moan about the incomprehensibility of government forms. I think it fair to say that that incomprehensibility pales into insignificance beside that of the user manuals supplied with today's consumer goods. In this case we have near 300 pages of e-manual (in pdf format) which has, so far, been of no help at all. It does not even have a proper title page. Maybe it works better in its native Korean. But at least one has a search feature, so there is hope for it yet.

PS 3: the next day: if response times at the NS&I website are anything to go by, lots of people are taking a punt on their new green bonds - 3% fixed for three years.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/09/cyber-flatpack.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/07/trial-by-television.html.