They Say That Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention

Well, that and poverty. Do you like my nice new shiny rain cowl. That's the silver dome thing in the foreground. The chimney stack is behind. The idea is that underneath each of those cowls is an air vent. Now some of them are a little broken. So what happens is that the rain falls through the holes that let the air through and gradually seeps down through the broken bits, through the roof and on to me! So I thought it might be a good idea to find some cowls to sit over them. What I ended up with, and what you see there is a 99p mixing bowl from Wilkos scilicone sealed to a block of 4x2 and then sealed again to the top of the vent.

It works...


What you see above is not an air vent. It's the inside of the boat, between the curve of the roof and the ceiling, specifically here, in the back bedroom. Those red, white and black things are, as you've probably guessed electric cables. That dark watery looking mess underneath them is indeed water. By now you've all got that water / wires = bad thing going on. The reason I knew this was there because the water carried on past the wires, through the ceiling and down on to the bed below. And it did this at various points along the walls.

The great thing about the kind of heavy rain we had on Saturday, i.e. the kind of rain that's so heavy it wakes you up with a start at 6am, is that it does tend to point out where the leaks are. 6 in total. Suddenly Chuffy had become some bizarre, warming Kafkaesque instrument of Chinese water torture. I'll admit to a bit of swearing and shouting and strop throwing but why not, it's what you do when it rains on the inside.

Probably foolish of me to think that I might get a weekend off. So instead I'm jumping between rain burst with a roll of kitchen towel and a tube of scilicone sealant and if you think that sounds rude, you should have been there. In between the dry bits I was unscrewing bits of ceiling to chase the drips. Do I have them all? Almost, there's one in the bathroom I haven't located yet but that could just be the taps. Shit, that's not good either. Have I been successful? No idea, I'm still at work. I'll know in about an hour and a half when I get home.


Tunes: Mercury Rev: Stillness Breathes (1991 - 2006)