Ben Reeve Lewis Friday Newsround #211

[Ben Reeve Lewis has just had supper …...]

I’ve had a gyppy tummy this week and haven’t eaten for a couple of days.

Just broke my fast with a Doner kebab and a large whisky. Not sure it was such a great idea but the evening will tell.

My body is my temple of course, which is why I’m having an extension built on the front to house the extra worshippers!

Whitstable waves

Frazzy and I exploited the weekend sun for a run down to Whitstable on Saturday, a place I haven’t been to for about 25 years. Our cocker Spaniel Hector went into the sea but discovered an unfortunate fear of waves and tried to climb on my back to get away from them, the wuss.

There’s some brilliant beach huts there that we admired, until we looked in local estate agent windows and saw the price….£22,500 for a beach hut????????? You’re ‘avin a Turkish on that one mate.

Mind you, I’ve seen 30 Romanian immigrants living in smaller. Maybe the rental income would balance out the mortgage.

Budget furore

Its Wednesday night right now and the furore over Osborne’s budget announcements is still firing off like a jumping jack.

The right wing press is full of reports about the reduction in tax relief on buy to let mortgages while the left wing press is bigging up the conservative’s insistence on restricting housing benefit for under 25s.

Regular readers will know that my sympathies lie with the left wing press (or in truth somewhere even further to the left) but the imminent danger of losing my kebab, not to mention my Famous Grouse, is limiting my analytical skills, so instead I’ll focus on mad nonsense.

Curbed nonsense

Curbed is a great property porn website Curbed who this week report on a surreal project to recreate Noah’s ark in all it’s full sized, fictional glory.

LeRoy Troyer, the project’s architect said rather bizarrely:

“They think the construction took about 100 years, so Noah had to have a lot of faith.”

So if it took 100 years what age exactly was Noah when he got the idea? Three at a push?

The apparent “Life sized replica” costing $29.5 million and the size of two football fields will open to the public next year.

My favourite comment being:

“And so [Ken Ham’s] museum is filled with buff animatronic Adams and sexpot Eves (plastic breasts covered by waterfalls of extremely healthy hair) and writhing snakes and flying dragons and dinosaurs much larger than the average chicken.”

Somehow the divine architecture rejects the Cubit of the king James bible (18 inches…..do keep up at the back there) in favour of the Egyptian Cubit at 20 inches based on the idea that ancient Egyptians were very tall, even though, as the article points out:

“Scientists say King Tut was five and a half feet”.

But its America so everything has to be bigger.

I don’t go to America much but by God, next time I go, I want to go there.

I like Curbed. I subscribe to the emails. Forget “A move to the country” or “Grand Designs”, Curbed advertises the sort of Big Apple madness that make Barrett homes look like beds in sheds…..which is of course exactly what they are.

Check out ‘Dorothy Draper’s riotously colourful world’  a 1925 home furnished by the aforesaid designer that I couldn’t begin to describe, unless you can think of Blackpool Rock as a design trope, or this mental $1.1 million Ikea style flatpack nightmare  that looks like the Amazon warehouse on the M4 near Swansea.

Testament if it ever needed making the money don’t buy you taste. Look at Michael Jackson’s Neverland.

At the other end of the spectrum Curbed also threw us 3 shipping containers welded together for less than $20,000  to form a 355 square metal cube. I don’t know how many giant Egyptian cubits that would be I’m afraid.

Hardly your usual American ‘Des-Res’ but which has probably caught the eye of several council homelessness units around the country looking for a cheap alternative to bed & breakfast in the current homelessness crisis.

The appeal being in the estate agent’s wording “Rugged, utilitarian aesthetic”. Can’t wait. I raid properties that could be described as having a ‘Rugged, Utilitarian aesthetic’ every day with police and environmental health. Except in the parlance of our non-estate agent world, we call ‘Shit holes’.

What’s the saying? “A singing pig may be a sight to behold but at the end of the day, its still a singing pig”.

This week, staying with Curbed we were offered a:

“Fab Tiny House Lets You Keep Your Big Ol’ Oven and Bathtub”

Well ‘Yee Haw’, what a folksy description.

In the US of A this is simply quirky stuff. The article informing us:

“While many people join the tiny house movement to downsize and live simply, this new model makes the already gorgeously finished space even easier to warm up”.

The tiny house movement to downsize and live simply????? Oh….you mean living in new build British homes!!!! Sorry I was thrown a bit there.

Being placed in tiny homes is what we call ‘Homelessness temporary accommodation’. …in fact its what we Brits refer to as ‘Buying a new house’ and we swap the ‘Big ol’ oven and bathtub’ for a ‘big ol’ flatscreen TV and home cinema system.

Jeez that so quaint Warren don’t you think?

Maybe the next time a homeless applicant refuses to be relocated to a Luton B&B we can persuade them that they are merely downsizing to live a more simple life, in touch with Thoreau’s beloved nature. Said nature being the bed bugs and cockroaches.

What made me smile this week

I was on a training course myself this week. Edgeware Rd, just up from Marble Arch. A two dayer learning new distance learning education software for the training side of my life.

We got evacuated during the afternoon of day two when the fire alarm went off. Police vans arrived, police cars arrived, police bikes arrived, an ambulance and a fire engine, all piling into the Tesco Metro on the ground floor of the training venue, only to come out with a completely bladdered street drinker waving an aerosol can around and loving every minute of the attention while his mates cheered him on.

In these I.S. times we are all getting a bit paranoid methinks.

See ya next week.