'Maldon Mud'

Clacton Fuzz.

Frinton Fuzz.

Chelmsford Attitude

My kitchen window has just fallen out. I went to close it, and it gave way - the entire thing, frame and glass plummeted all the way down. Emergency glazier - £470 call out fee.

It's my birthday on Friday. I was going to treat myself to something nice.

Sounds like you're in a bit of a jamb.

VG. It's my luck that this would happen in late November rather than late July. If it was warmer, I could've shopped around, taken the night to arrange something without desperation, avoided the emergency call out surcharge on top of a mere call out fee.

Sill, it could be worse.

cosmictanya wrote:

My kitchen window has just fallen out. I went to close it, and it gave way - the entire thing, frame and glass plummeted all the way down. Emergency glazier - £470 call out fee.

Did it fall out on the outside or the inside?

That reminds me of when my dad once checked my window frames and discovered they were only held in by fiction and could fall out at any moment.

He went round with his toolkit and screwed them into the walls to make them safe.

The Call of the Wendigo wrote:

That reminds me of when my dad once checked my window frames and discovered they were only held in by fiction

You're just making that up.

cosmictanya wrote:

It's my birthday on Friday. I was going to treat myself to something nice.

That's made me feel even sadder than all the mentions of Silent Running. Which I hate to think about because it's so sad.

It fell outwards. It's lucky nobody was walking by.

Yes, that would've been putty nasty.

I've done my back in from my futile attempt to grab it. If only I'd known it was going to happen, I could've had some fun with it first. I don't know how, maybe thrown an ironing board or something through the glass, just to see how it would feel.

Very efficient repair service - a white painted frame with Perspex panes was installed in no time at all. If it wasn't for the ugly nuts and bolts and bracing on show, facing into the room, I could probably just get away with leaving it like that.

Amazingly, one of the sash panes was found unsmashed, all the way down - just some splintered wood frame along one side - they brought it back upstairs to show me. The rest of it was in various states of non existence. Smithereens or something.

A disappointingly prosaic description of events I'm afraid.

The glazier wasn't a mysterious, swarthy young man with an innocent, but faintly heathen air about him then?

An uncanny resemblance of the infamous, near-Lovecraftian, pharaoh of the North End Road?

Sick of dragging the vacuum cleaner around the floor, I realised I had an upright at the back of a cupboard. Such excitement. I now remember why I put it at the back of the cupboard - it leaves scorch marks across the carpets. It cleans to a spotless finish, bit you pay for it in discolouration.

Oh I’d almost forgotten about the window that fell out.

As it turns out, likely an early sign of the structural problems the building has gone on to encounter.

Anyway, it’s just one thing after another. I’m sick and tired of it. I’m beginning to realise why all the Greatest Generation fled the old flats they’d grown up in, and started married life in, for brand new suburbs in the 50’s and 60’s. Starting boxfresh is beginning to appeal.