This guy afforded me much amusement during the cold war of Brexit.  So I feel it my civic duty to host his "exhibition".

"ABOUT 'YOU, ME & COLD WAR STEVE
THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF THE PEOPLE'

Thank you for taking the time to download the exhibition!
All these pictures will print up very big but will also look great small so you choose. You may need to play about to make sure you're getting the best results resolution wise. Ask a mate who's good with the stuff, or as a last resort email and we'll try to help!
Print to paper, direct to board or foam board, feel free to mount or add borders if you want. You may decide to frame them, or not. 
There is no set order to display. Titles of each are included as the file names. Other than that there is no info to include, feel free to write your own if you want. 
We'll be doing an exhibition tour poster template for you to use, so drop us an email so we can send it out to you when it's ready. Let us know about your exhibition, send us the details so we can include on our round up of who is showing the pictures where. We'll do what we can to support before and during the exhibition period. 

Have fun and be creative . . 

The CWS Office 
[email protected]
x"

My old man died five years ago. Five years, two months and thirteen days, to be precise.  On his 81st birthday.

You accumulate a lot of stuff in 81 years - which ended up being shared with my family and others, including the house I currently live in. And amongst all the stuff, he left a car. A car that he went on about constantly, to my complete incomprehension. (I'm sure it's very nice Dad... but it's only a Honda). Since the administration of his estate was a job that fell to me, I thought I'd better clean it up (he'd barely driven it for a year), drive it around for a bit to ensure it was still working and then get rid of it.

Instead, I fell in love with it.

Dozy woman's insurers - Admiral - pronounced the Legend a Cat S (structurally damaged) write-off. Absolute nonsense, which has led to a month of arguing, after which they had a change of heart (an MOT pass helped) and authorised repairs.  But this is a 12 year old car and Honda can't get a new door to the UK until May.  Ho hum really - I sealed up the gap between window and crumpled door with duct tape and have been happily driving her around for the last two months.

Returning from Birmingham this week - a 280 mile round trip - I'd made it all the way to the Reigate exit from the M25, when Waze suggested I might be better off taking a route through the narrow backroads of Chipstead to get home. I wish I'd ignored this advice, but I didn't.  I know those roads - but the several drivers around me probably also following Waze clearly didn't. Which is probably why another twonk piled into the back of me at the junction of Doghurst and Hazlewood lanes.

My insurer's agents have given me the dullest of VW Passats to drive around in, whilst arranging to get repairs assessed: this is an entirely separate claim. But, looking at the damage, I suspect this is the end of The Legend - this kick up the arse looks a lot more expensive to me, assuming they can even get the parts - and if they can, I'll probably be waiting until June for them.

It's a tragedy really. She might be 12 years old, but she'd probably go on for another 12 if twats didn't keep driving into her. This immaculate, beautiful car may only make one more journey.

To the scrapheap.

​Our architect likes to commission professional photos of his work.  Since we get copies, that's fine by us.

​It's hard to believe this is actually our house, the one that we actually live in n'all.  It won't look like this for long.
​

Photos by: Massimo Crisafi

I last wrote some crap about our build back at the beginning of this five-month exercise in complete disruption of our existence. A more naive time, in which I speculated on the likelihood of this not going as swimmingly well as it had started out.  And, to be honest... it didn't, in more ways than I could have imagined. Not because the various involved parties fell out - although they did, quite spectacularly on occasion - but because shit really does happen. Some of it inevitable small shit that had the capacity to break our ultimate vision. Some, rather big shit involving five tonnes of steelwork that deflected rather more than our structural engineer had calculated it should.  The repairs associated with this latter element are currently underway on the upper floors...

But I don't want to be be negative about it at the moment - because we have just about finished moving into the new space, the crap is mostly behind us and, in general, I think we've got most of it right.  The Christmas break was an ideal opportunity to test it out with others and sixteen of us on New Years Eve found it worked really well for mass food and drink and general end-of-decade celebration. Which was a large part of our motivation for doing it. So I'm not going to list all the difficult stuff we've been through - I'll do that another time - but just post a few pictures for the time being.

​Here are a few along the journey:

And four of the end result:

I've written stuff about this house, its history and our plans before - from the decision to move in, to the work in the roof, the living in shit years, the bathrooms...  But I've only alluded to the last big chunk. So here I am, writing about the last big chunk. Because, suddenly, we find that we are now pretty committed to seeing it through. We have a 3 tonne digger in the garden. Actually, we have no garden. We have a building site.

We set out on this last phase over a year ago, by way of a conversation with Kevin at KJC, a chance encounter resulting from me seeing someone recommend  him on Nextdoor and thinking he might be a good chap to help us develop our ideas. And we didn't really bother going anywhere else, because we liked the way he thought about what we wanted to achieve, his energy, his disparaging attitude to most domestic building projects. Also, he is slowly redeveloping the entire Carshalton Park environs and has won awards for the highest density of billboards in a suburban area. He drinks tea by the bucketful and is really good at swearing. We couldn't have asked for more.

Kev has our project on his site, although the plans have moved on somewhat since he put it there and he hasn't updated them.  Because he is really good at swearing but not at updating his website. You can watch a video of a slightly more up-to-date version of the model below, on the left. ​ Or, if you want to play about with it, click on the '3D Model Viewer ' link on the right, below and wait a while for it to load up in your web browser.  You can access the controls to manipulate it on the right, once it's loaded.

We've actually played around with the internals quite a lot since KJC produced this model and I buggered about with it to try and convey some of the detail of what we wanted. But, in any case, it looks nothing like this at the moment. At the time of writing, this is what it looks like:

Kevin ran a tender for us.  And after lots of meetings and discussions and negotiation and cogitation, we commissioned Tom Power of Tom Power Design to come and build our vision for us. Tom was massively enthusiastic about the project, which is mostly what sold him to us.  He is also an expert in variation management and runs a firm full of slackers who have taken two weeks just to knock a load of shit down. He even employs his own family so they can turn up and charge me a load more money.

I'm joking, obviously. After two weeks of frenzied demolition activity, the footings are going in right outside my window as I type. We are very happy so far.  But there are 13 weeks of a 15 week project to go and ample time for everyone to fall out. Which is what I'm told often happens. Not seeing any sign of it yet to be honest.

Nothing focuses the mind more than seeing a three-tonne digger turn up in your back garden and start tearing the crap out of everything (my Dad's ponds are GONE! :-) ). Some early pictures of 'knocking shit down' below. Inevitably, I will be writing more on this topic in the coming weeks...