| Now I know that if these emails are anything to go by, unemployment is one big holiday. But I spent last Thursday morning spreading horse manure over Mum’s allotment. So there. And as I scraped the horse shit across the frozen earth, I thought about how quickly our situation in life can change. I realised that, ultimately, we’re all just one bit of good news away from everything being ok again. And as if by magic, that afternoon, some good news arrived. A company I’d been interviewing for offered me a job. Hooray! ‘So what’s the job’, I hear you chanting to the tune of ‘it’s coming home’. Well, I’m going to be a writer for a bike website called road.cc. I’m actually so chuffed. The job’s in Bath, and so I’m planning on moving to Bristol in the next few weeks. |
 Coincidentally, I had already arranged to go down to Bristol on the weekend. I was visiting Hal and Ida to see their new flat and celebrate Hal’s birthday. I recon a quarter of the people reading this have met Hal and Ida. But if you haven’t, the main thing to know about them is that they have perfected domestic life to the point that it almost seems like an art form. They cook delicious vegan meals using fancy Japanese knives, meticulously seasoned pans and organic ingredients. Their bookshelf is filled with the philosophical, political and architectural. All objects in their house fit within a large yet perfectly harmonious colour palette. It smells like fresh laundry. I like it there. I asked whether I could live in their lounge and they laughed it off…fair enough.   But there was one factor that was spoiling their domestic perfection: humidity. The moisture levels were totally out of control, and that simply wasn’t going to fly. It wasn’t mouldy, and it wasn’t damp. But, for Hal and Ida, it was simply too humid. They could just feel that it wasn’t right. Thankfully, the landlord had provided them with a beast of a dehumidifier. It was large, it measured and displayed a variety of data points, and it made a deep, powerful ‘whoosh’ sound. Hal was in love.Having arrived on the same day as the dehumidifier, I had to accept that I had been majorly upstaged. Hal and Ida’s pride when they emptied the water it had collected each evening was comparable only to that of parents watching their child in their first Nativity play. At night, I lay on the living room floor and listened to the dehumidifier purring just a few feet away from me on the other side of the wall. I think it was mocking me.   Somehow, throughout the entire weekend, every conversation came back to the dehumidifier. Or at the very least, to moisture and humidity. Hal and I went to see the SS Great Britain, a massive steel ship built by Brunel, and the first thing he commented on when we looked at the hull was the challenges they must face preventing rust from air-borne moisture.On Saturday evening, we returned home to find an Amazon delivery waiting for us. Hal and Ida were practically bouncing off the walls. They ripped off the packaging to reveal… a window vacuum, which sucks condensation off windows. This, they said, was going to be the final word in the battle against humidity. No droplets of condensation were safe.  Sure enough, for the next two mornings they did the rounds, uniformly removing any water from the windows with perfectly vertical strokes of the window vacuum. But after relentless derision from yours truly, they had become ashamed of their pursuit for the perfect humidity levels, perhaps realising that it made them seem… well… a bit sad I suppose. So neither of them let on that they were doing the morning window vacuum. Instead, Ida would just slip out of the kitchen while I nursed a coffee, returning 5 minutes later looking very pleased with herself.  Moisture levels aside, it was a perfect weekend, and I had a thoroughly delightful time. Hal and Ida thank you – you are almost as good at being hosts as I am at being a guest, and that’s saying something. As for everyone else, hows it going? Hope you’re tip top. Love, James  |
out of Control moisture Levels in Bristol
