No its not a moat! & a short Marathon of The North

Looking at the papers this morning the Sunday Express tells us, "Now we pull our own teeth" this is all to do with the cost of visiting the dentist.  I think this type of DIY dentistry has been around for a lot longer than the story implies!  One of our neighbours is going through the "all out" procedure just now and has had a top set of dentures fitted, it seems strange to see him with a full set of "Pearlie's!"

Theres a sky news story which is also on the front page of the Sunday People about the suicide of a woman in connection with the so called bedroom tax  The poor woman couldn't afford the £20 extra rent imposed by the scheme and ended her life, clearly blaming the government in a letter to her family.  Reading the whole story though it appears she could have been registered as disabled and received disability benefit - - -

Another story catching my eye was cone of a woman who contracted Lyme disease  while out walking her dog in 2003.  She picked up a tick the size of a poppy seed on her ankle and years of agony followed - - - worth a read.

I was busy, carefully spray painting our boundary the other day between our house number 4 and number 5 in the terrace.  The reason was an attempt to remedy a long standing damp problem on a wall in our "below ground" level" kitchen area.  I'm convinced the problem is exacerbated by the amount of run off from number 5's garage.  An earlier attempt at re-routing the run off water to one of his outside drains seemed not to have provided the solution.

The idea was then, to dig 2 drainage channels in our "owned" part of the "private right of way" in the hope of diverting the water to our outside drain.  The neighbour from number 3 enquired if the proposed channel  spray painted lines were "a moat!"

Here's a pic of what the problem might be

Originally the water from the roof ran from the drain pipe on the building and down the gully it had formed in the concrete straight to the top of our stairs where it eventually found its way onto the wall in question.  I diverted the flow with the extra bit of pipe which can be seen running almost to the garage door at floor level. This had the effect of sending most of the water to number 5's outside drain, but our wall remained damp.  An anomaly here is the dry patch to the right of a crack in the asphalt which points to something under that line channelling the water "our way". We hoped our excavation would remedy that.

So at 8:30 yesterday and with the help of a neighbour, "lets call him Alan" we set to with the excavating.  Alan had provided one of those impact drills and away we went!

Here we are about an hour later having got the first channel finished.  The concrete at the far end, right on our boundary, was only a thin skin but the near end took some hammering with the tool in the pic.
Unfortunately the impact drill gave up the ghost as we started the second channel!

So having got the outline done with the impact drill it was back to the old hammer and chisel to dig it out!  It soon became obvious this was going to take "some considerable time!"

A white knight then appeared over the horizon, "lets call him James" from number 3 and let us borrow his impact drill and we made very short work on the rest of the job.

The black line in the pic shows our boundary, its an odd angle which is repeated down most of the terrace.  The idea now is the lower channel catches any run off from next doors gully at the right of the picture and the upper channel stops the lower one being overwhelmed by any other surface run off. 

All we needed was some rain which the heavens duly supplied 2 hours later.  Viola! it worked, the channels soon had water in them.

This morning's shot of the same pic at the start of the "tale" seems to indicate a partial success, the "dry patch" of pic No1 is now, to some degree wet, indicating a diversion of run off water!.  Judging by today's weather forecast the project will be tested this afternoon!

Finally - - - Through some shoddy marshaling on the Marathon of The North only the bloke that won it went the right way.  He was so far in front of everyone else that the "chasing bunch" went the wrong way and cut off 264 metres of the course and were in effect disqualified.  The organisers infuriated some runners by offering a 25% discount on their next entry for the race in some form of misguided compensation.  I suppose it would have added insult to injury to divide the 264 metres into the whole distance and offer a refund for that portion! - - - - --

Enjoy the day

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