Pretty But . . .

I went to see a friend and we met up at Audley End house near Saffron Walden. It is a lovely garden and classic English country house.

Third Of Original Size
Third Of Original Size

The gardens were designed by Capability Brown, the house is old. I didn’t get to look inside because after walking the dog the house was shut to new visitors. It’s quite an impressive building.

We, as a country, like to visit these places. We like to keep them as part of our history and they are definitely part of our history. The problem is houses like this are part of the problems of our current too.

Odd For Essex?
Odd For Essex?

These buildings serve to act as reminders that the people are subservient to the masters. We are to do as we are told and assume that those in charge are looking after us. This building is built to impress but also oppress. The modern visitor has little thought for the structure of society and the machine it has to keep everyone in their place.

The leaders lead and rule and at the same time those below that level are constantly told of our position and that we should do as we are told. The upper classes assume the position of lord of the manor while the rest of us live in shit. There is a perception that the leaders and chiefs will do what is good for the whole of society. But the vast majority of them don’t. Look at the current political leaders. They will do whatever they can to maintain their power at the expense of the country and population as a whole.

I look at these houses and churches and see the waste of money. The consumption of the planet for the greed of the few. The repression of the masses for the stability of a family.

Viva la revolution!

Chimney Balloon

I’ve lived in my house for nearly ten years. It’s an old house (built 1880) and a Victorian terrace. The back of the house overlooks fields and woods all the way to the paper mill at Aylesford. There’s always steam (or smoke – less pleasant but it’s probably steam because a lot of water is used in paper stuff) of some kind spewing from the mill.

Mostly the wind comes from the south to west in the South East of Great Britain. This means it travels freely over the open area at the back of my house and then strikes my house nearly front on.

map fields

In the map the long thin blue bit is a river (tidal section of the river) and the big blue bits are quarry lakes.

The wind hits the back of the house. This causes high local pressure while over the house the wind continues moving creating a low local pressure (Bernoulli Principle). Most of the gaps in my house are at the back of the building. This means that the wind flows through these gaps and exits through the largest hole in the house which is the chimney, which has a lower pressure at the top!

wind diagram

This situation caused draughts and noise even when there was a slight wind.

One day I got “Google happy” and just searched for a chimney balloon. I don’t know what prompted me to search for this, I may have searched for “chimney draughts” first and then found the chimney balloon. Who know? Google and Chrome but I’m not going to spend my time looking through my history.

I ordered a chimney balloon from Amazon. It’s a plastic bag that I inflated in the chimney pipe. It blocks the chimney. It stops the draughts. Simple. I’m impressed with what a simple solution it is.

The one draw back is that it has also made the dining room really quiet. I can no longer hear the outside world. This is very strange but something I’ll get used to. There were some serious winds recently and I only knew about them when I went into the bathroom (it is at the back of the house), the dining room was that quiet. Also, my feet no longer get really cold when I sit in the dining room as there is no draught (or rather minimal draught now).

Sonos

I have installed some Sonos components in my house. I have been really impressed with the simplicity of them. They work really well. My only complaint would be that I have to physically turn the speakers on and off as I walk around the house. I don’t want them screaming out all the time to no-one.

I want an RFID chip installed in my arm and detectors placed in my house and then that connected to my Sonos system controller so it knows which speakers to turn on and off. THAT would make me extremely happy and also BIONIC. Yippee.

I lied, I have another complaint. As the Sonos controller unit reads my iTunes library I think it should be able to write to it so I get a “played” count whenever I play tunes. There are some tunes on my NAS drive that aren’t in my iTunes library but then I couldn’t care about those. It is highly unlikely I will ever play those through the Sonos system.