The council giveth and the council taketh away. After my relief that they were finally doing something about the potholes, I discovered this morning when I went to the dump (aka waste recycling centre aka civic amenity site) that the council propose closing it as part of their cost saving drive. This is a dismal prospect. It is the closest dump to my house, and always busy. If it closes I'll have to drive further to get to one of the others, and given local complaints and warnings about queues and traffic jams at the other sites, getting rid of horsetail, creeping sorrel, unwanted seed heads etc is going to be a lot more trouble than at present. Probably quite a few people won't want to go to the extra trouble, and flytipping will increase.
It is a tough one, and I don't know what they should cut instead. Obviously I ought to think that libraries are more important than rubbish dumps, except that I use the dump weekly in the growing season, whereas I haven't used a library, except to ask them to put up concert posters, for eight years. I'm left hoping they could maybe rationalise some of their property and office costs, but don't have the enthusiasm to trawl through the council accounts to see what seemingly unecessary expenditure lurks within. Council fact-finding missions or something.
Looking at the local paper online I saw that a couple from Harwich were killed on one of the junctions off the A120, just the day after I grumbled here about how dangerous the turnings were. On the same day a fatal crash on the A12 at the Essex-Suffolk border killed another two people, injured two more, one severely, and caused a traffic jam that backed up to the outskirts of Ipswich plus queues on other local roads as motorists tried to avoid the A12. It is a terrible road. Something should be done, if only dropping the speed limit to 50mph on that stretch to try and reduce the number of cars that fly off it. The human consequences are tragic, and traffic chaos through the area certainly doesn't do my place of work any good.
I swept and tidied the conservatory yesterday morning, pruned and weeded and fed the plants, and washed out the filter of the pump that fed the water spout on the back wall. I was quite proud of myself as I worked out from first principles that to test whether the filter was the cause of the thing running at a mere trickle I should immerse the pump without the filter in a bucket of clean water, and even more proud when I got the whole thing to work properly. It has been switched off for months to save electricity, but I got exasperated by the penny pinching, and the knowledge that compared to the carbon output of China this piece of self-denial was not helping the planet in any meaningful way. Ten minutes after switching the pump back on, the main trip switch on the fuse box clunked to Off.
My initial guilty assumption was that it must have been switching on my pump what done it. I was out after lunch, but returned to find the Systems Administrator hot and demoralised, having spent the entire afternoon trying and failing to work out what had gone wrong. Something had happened in the circuit that supported half the downstairs plugs, but the origin of the trouble was a mystery. The only consoling thought was that the S.A. had remembered to plug the freezer into a socket that still worked, so we didn't have to contend with a mountain of defrosted soft fruit and apple puree. I am very attached to my stores of home-grown fruit, what with all the work that went into picking and prepping it.
Today an electrician arrived at lunchtime, who seems to have identified the problem, which was not anything the S.A. could ever have guessed. Something had caused a short circuit in a wire that was left over from the days when the house took its water from a well and so had an electric well pump. The wire was no longer used for anything, so far as the electrician could see, but was simply there, like an appendix. Disconnecting the faulty wire from the rest of the wiring ought to do the trick. The electrician was very cheerful, and liked cats, as well as turning up within four hours of my phone call to the firm that rewired the house for us when we moved in, so he was a hit all round. The way they work out the loscation of the short circuit is very clever. After switching the whole circuit off at the fuse box, you send an electrical signal up each bit of cable. If it can short circuit, that is cross from one wire to the other, a signal pings back to the testing device. No return signal, no short circuit. Apparently garages are a frequent location for faults, what with the damp and the cold, but the good news was that the wiring in ours still looked fine. And the fuse box, while it couldn't be fitted nowadays in a new-build or rewiring project, is perfectly safe, and still legal in existing installations.
My pump was thus exonerated, and the whole wiring debacle not nearly as bad as it could have been. But I'm annoyed about the dump.
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