Bricks don't bend.

I have a great respect for the previous owner whom, I understand, gave up a career as a structural engineer to take up the calling of priesthood. His Grandfather designed most of the civic buildings in Dublin and it seems that much of this architectural (thank God for spell check eh!) skill rubbed off on to his Grandchild. As he designed the oak staircase in our house and also built the summer house, much of the garden wall and a conservatory.

However I feel that whilst carrying out his missionary work here in deepest Norfolk he contracted the debilitating disease known as NFN. This as I have explained previously (including the first ever Blog on this site) a condition that renders the sufferer to deal with things from an unexpected direction or thought process, logic rarely playing any part in the patients reality. It is abbreviated to NFN but the full name is Normal For Norfolk.

For example I believe that he re-built the chimney in the living room. I maybe wrong but either way whoever built this chimney clearly suffered a mild dose of NFN. Starting at the foundations the bricks were true and level. In every likelihood a spirit level was introduced to the scheme and some logic applied.
HOWEVER, a cross beam of upright bricks placed at a slight, but yet interesting, curve caused the builder to pull on the logical side of his brain, but this was confused by the NFN virus and he could see no way forward other than to place the next layer of bricks in line with this new curve. From then on things just got worse as each consecutive layer of bricks was placed the curve became more and more pronounced (much like the pea under the mattress the thing became more and more of an issue that by the time it reached the top it was almost a lost cause.
You can see that at one point he tried to break this cycle by trying to bend a brick (2nd one up from the mantelpiece and 2nd along). BUT once again afflicted by the NFN virus he did not 'get' the fact that BRICKS DON'T BEND and having had the brick snap at the attempt he just put it in any way, in the two halves one at a slightly jaunty angle. We have two of these fireplaces and they aren't wrong.......... They are just 'different'.

That's what my school teacher used to say about my work at school, He'd say, "Michael" as the other kids laughed, "It's not wrong, it is just different". Unfortunately, and in hindsight, it was a little cruel of him as he was my maths teacher and I now know that generally speaking there is rarely more than one answer to a sum. Between you and me I think he was taking the 'P' out of me!

THERE IS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT. Please don't have nightmares about contracting NFN as it has a very long gestation period and you would have to be living in Norfolk for many a year before you would succumb to the disease in it's most prevalent form.

Now back to the previous owners design eccentricities, We have a small front yard, the centre of which is lower than the surrounding land and unfortunately at times of heavy rain a very deep puddle can form very quickly. Sadly this puddle can breach the Garage doors flooding the room. So to overcome this a pump has been fitted down in the drain in the centre of the yard. Clever, I hear you say.     Mmmmmmmmm......

The problem is all the pump does is pump the water from the drain up to a large green water butt. Again, I can hear you mummble Clever......

BUT once the tank is full it just overflows and the water bubbles ferociously back out again, down the sides of the butt, across the yard and right back into the drain from whence it first came! Charlie Dimmock would be proud of me as it is a full on Water Feature.

Perhaps at this point a picture would illustrate the issue....

The drain is just in-front of the big blue bag and it pumps the water into the butt on the far right of the photo, where if it is not emptied it spills over the top of the tank flowing back down into the drain where once again it is pumped back up to the tank and so on and so on.


To over come this NFN design I have placed a hose pipe trailing it from the water tank right across the yard (see the above photo) to the street where it oozes out into the street drain. Now the question is why the pump simply just doesn't pump the excess water straight out onto the street in the first place especially as the street is only 4' to the right of the blue bag?

I do hope that you are keeping up with this!

AND THEN further to this Heath Robinson design and knowing that the yard floods in times of heavy rain they decide to take the drain pipe that collects all the water from the big roof seen in the photo and send it pouring into the yard. If however you study the photo to the left you'll see that the drain pipe ends neatly over the road. Someone has then gone to quite some trouble to bend the pipe all the way back into the yard so it can fill it up like the bow of the bloody Titanic!


So anyway, the pump works fine, well it does now as I spent an hour a few weeks back pulling several years of black sludge out of it.

It works fine until today when God decided to follow up the previous tornado with a hearty Hurricane. Claire and I were driving into the village in quite normal but slightly hot weather. The windows were all open, when quite literally as we entered the village the car was attacked by the most freakish high winds. I mean they came as a total surprise hitting us at some great velocity causing me to struggle with steering the car. We got home and the wind was howling, we were bringing Scribble our cat back from the Vets, and we both simultaneously thought of Dorothy & Toto from the Wizard of Oz and that house disapearing into the sky,

Within minutes torrential rain plummeted from the heavens  and the house was thrown into darkness, mainly because of a power cut.

This meant two very important things to us.

Firstly NO TEA!

Secondly no power meant no pump in the yard and at the very time we really needed that pump to stop the annex flooding. We checked the yard and inch by inch the water lapped up closer & closer to the garage doors. Alison, Claire & I all worked on lifting all water damage risk items from the floor of the Annex including all of the builders heavy cement bags.

Then Alison or Claire, or both had the brain wave to use the builders sack of sand to make sand bags to dam the doors. We went out into the rain and started to fill which ever bags we could get our hands on with sand. We used full bags of compost, Sainsburys bags of life (not any more) and even an Ikea blue bag eventually stemming the flow just before it breached the line.

Once again there were tiny frogs ever where like some kind of croaking plague. The power was still off by the time we had finished and so we could only get out the Chinese takeaway menu and 'order-up'!

The rain has stopped, The frog have all gone home, I am full and I owe the builder some sand.

Oh and the power came back on about an hour later. I am going to have to think of contingency plans for when (if ever) we go on holiday. But that is for another day.




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