10) Rainy day

Nothing done today because the weather just wasn’t good enough. The temperature must be close to 10 degrees Celsius colder than it has been for the past few days, and it’s been alternately drizzling and raining hard all day. As I’m using the power sander to strip and key the inside of the hull there is a huge amount of dust swirling about - so I’m not going to do that in the garage because a) I’ll be breathing it in and b) it’ll get into everything in the garage, including all the stuff stored in there - and I’m not going to try it outside because I’m using mains electricity, and although we’ve got trip fuses I don’t like depending on them.

So today I went to our local hardware store - Malcolm’s - and bought a new cheap folding workbench (made in China, £20). I need this because I’ve used my old bench to bolt my cheap circular saw to (made in China, £40). This I bought to rip timber down to small sections to bend easily for laminating; it’s been a great success although it’s obviously not very heavy duty. But do we make anything in this country any more? I think most of the tools and most of the electronic stuff I’ve bought lately has come from China. China makes most of what both B&Q and Ikea sell, I know. I wonder what the balance of payments between Europe and China is like.

Anyway, now I’m waiting on the weather to carry on repairing and painting the inside of the hull. The forecast promised better tomorrow - but then they didn’t get today right!

Which reminds me of a wonderful story from some book or article I’ve read lately. The weather forecasters on a Pacific Island were congratulating themselves on getting the forecast right 80% of the time - until someone pointed out that if they just said each morning “it will be hot and sunny today” they’d have been right 85% of the time. (Anyone who knows where this came from please remind me.)