Author: Deborah Makarios

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In Search of a Working Kettle

Despite what the US Embassy in London may say, microwaving is not the right way to heat water for tea. For one thing, an explosion of superheated water as you take your mug from the microwave creates the very opposite of the soothing and restorative effect a good cuppa should have. The proper way to make tea is with water boiled in a kettle, and these days that’s usually a super-convenient electric kettle.

Except.

As Consumer NZ wrote in 2019, “We’d expect even the cheapest kettle to last at least five years of household use” – but their survey showed that 85% of kettles are defunct before they reach that age.

Diagram of an electric kettle controller.
What could possibly go wrong?

This does not surprise me in the least. Over the course of our marriage, the Caped Gooseberry and I have seen no fewer than five electric kettles bite the dust – including the one that memorably died the day after we moved house.

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A Turn Up for the Books

This week I got some very surprising news.

Some of you may be aware that since early 2019, I’ve been selling my ebooks through Smashwords. Some of you may even be aware that since early 2022, Smashwords has been gradually merging with Draft2Digital. You might even know that Draft2Digital doesn’t accept Creative Commons-licensed works (which is why I went with Smashwords).

But how many of you knew that not only would Draft2Digital’s policy be the prevailing one in the merger, but Smashwords itself decided four or five years ago (i.e. just after I published my first CC-licensed work with them) that they didn’t accept CC-licensed works either?

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In Praise of Old Technology: The Terraced House

Terraced houses – also known as row houses and even townhouses – are an older technology than you might imagine. What, after all, is a longhouse but a row of terraced housing without the firewalls separating each part?

A Vietnamese long-house on short stilts. One end with a deck and door is visible, and one side with three open windows with shutters.

The firewalls are, however, an important development. They remove one of the main disadvantages to the longhouse: the possibility that someone will – accidentally or otherwise – burn down the whole neighbourhood in one go.

(Where I grew up, it was not unknown for people to burn their own house down as a way to make someone else feel bad about What They Did, and this is a large part of why they don’t live in longhouses any more. Hard to tell if burning your house down is passive-aggressive or just plain aggressive, when it’s also everybody else’s house.)

Terraced houses, you may recall, were in the news not so long ago. Kirstie Allsopp, co-presenter of Location, Location, Location, was being condemned for opposing detached housing, despite living in a “nice detached Devon property” (to which she responded, “Most Jacobean mansions are detached, you morons. In London I live in a block of flats”).

On closer inspection, it is only the building of detached housing where terraced housing would be more suitable that has attracted her ire. As she points out, “It’s not the fact that they are detached; it’s the quality of them. Better to build semis or terraced houses with bigger gardens, better heat & sound insulation and, vitally, more space inside, than pretend those tiny little gaps means they are “detached” and somehow better.”

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