On the Wires

Not so long ago the identification colours of fixed wiring in the UK changed to supposedly harmonise with the EU. Red and black became brown and blue respectively, much to the angst of practising electricians everywhere, not least because a whole new generation will never appreciate the advice: “Red to red, black to black... ‘blue’ to bits”. For three-phase wiring the phase colours which were red, yellow and blue are now brown, black and grey and the neutral which was black is now blue. Are you with me so far?

Amazingly there is yet to be a documented incidence of death directly attributable to colour blindness and this even in the face of accurate colour vision no longer being a requirement for apprentice electricians – political correctness gone kaboom. Much of that is due to a natural British caution, a distinct lack of which I have witnessed most of the world over. We have had wiring regulations for over 130 years and even if our electricians are not well-versed in their specifics our systems of circuit protection can be replicated by rote and are generally practised. At the heart of this protection is the recognition of the earth itself as a conductor.

I mention this fact merely to suggest that to a British electrician the lack of deliberate connection to earth is a show-stopper, whereas to a Bulgarian artisan earthing appears to be an exotic and unnecessary option. This probably explains why Andrew has been getting random small shocks from unexpected sources in his new Bulgarian home – the Old School. And this is why I’m here – quicker, we thought to get a British electrician to fly out and have a go, than to learn sufficient Bulgarian to accurately explain the cause of death.

Bulgaria has been in the EU for seven years now and I doubt that harmonisation with CENELEC is uppermost in their priorities, but I was pleasantly surprised to find a wide selection of the familiar and not so familiar on display in the local wholesaler’s shop. Via a combination of pointing, holding up fingers and a three-way translation between English, Bulgarian and Greek we assembled most of what we needed. Their wiring, by the way, is brown, blue and black; no confusion there.

So, the project started. I was expecting to be chasing cables into walls, sinking in boxes and bringing a small part of the building up to a UK standard of electrical safety and conformity but the sheer scale of the building makes this an enormous task without extra hands and equipment, so we opted for function before form. And as the installation is effectively temporary, all of the cabling is simply nailed to the walls. Once that decision was made it was but a small slide to cutting corners. Why waste pennies on expensive junction boxes when twisted and taped joints will do the job?

Hey, don’t knock it! Before I got here there was a solitary light in operation, dangling precariously from the ceiling of room 13; now he has ten lights on two-way switching* throughout the entrance and grand stairway. Three days ago there were three sockets and a mass of trailing leads; now he has a dozen, situated where they are needed. And while up until today everything was connected directly to the incoming supply cable without a circuit breaker in sight, he now has a fully protected consumer unit with half a dozen active circuits.

Breath easy - it's all safe now...

*Ahem, the 'two-way switching'business: In Bulgaria you nod for ‘no’ and shake your head for ‘yes’. This is my excuse for the fact that lacking a functioning continuity tester I wired up the two-way switches from top to bottom as you would throughout the known world whereas the Bulgarian switches are wired left to right. (For sparkies, the ‘common’ is where L1 would normally be.) Hey, my bad, it will be work of minutes to sort them out. One day. Soon. As for the colour coding, it’s all green and yellow now! 

Super Diversity

You have to hand it to Twitter, I mean you really do. There I was, idling away my Sunday, vaguely wondering what I would blog about, given the overly-rich diet of bad news right now, when all of a sudden an unbidden inspiration emerged from the gloom. An untermensch of Merseyside origin decided to challenge me on the content of somebody else’s tweet. I had clicked on the re-tweet link several hours earlier, but fair enough; if you don’t get out of bed in the morning it can be hard to keep up to speed. 

Where, he wanted to know, had I sourced my figures for potential Bulgarian immigration to Britain? The fact that I had sourced no such figures and that the words were not my words didn’t seem to satisfy the intrepid inquisitor, who then proceeded to alternately harangue and plead and guess and insult and generally make himself unwelcome for a couple of hours or so. Such is the playground mentality of ‘social’ media, a few others gathered to watch the scrap, occasionally interjecting the odd catcall or ‘helpful’ piece of advice. 

He was right about one thing, however, I am genuinely concerned about future immigration and unhappy about levels of past immigration. The fact that the Labour Party, responsible for the massive unbalanced recent surge is finally admitting some culpability should be concern for everybody; politicians don’t admit to anything unless the wall is well and truly covered in already unshiftable shit. 

Even yesterday, Boris Johnson was trotting out the tri-party line that immigration is an overall positive thing for Britain, as if immigration ITSELF was a solution, not the problem - politically and socially - it very clearly is. Immigration as an end is not a good thing and surely if it is about the economy, immigration should always be a second choice solution, not the first. 

Maybe it’s me who has it all wrong, but can somebody please explain the logic in simultaneously creating an underclass of welfare dependent, unemployables whilst importing a new underclass of unskilled sub-minimum wage workers? Can somebody persuade me that despite massive investment in expensive technical gewgaws our non-academic kids are not leaving school without the basic tools for a working life? Can somebody find me a single, non-brainwashed, non-Toynbeed, moderate British citizen, who is not gravely concerned about all this? 

My Twitter interrogator sounded at first like he might be just such an example, but then he launched into the default mindless Thatcher-hate credo that blights that particular part of the country, long ago lost to an ethnic entity separate from the mainstream. But they’ve been assimilated into the population in their own unique way - it’s a pretty much unchallenged national view that it’s acceptable to scorn a Scouser. So I did. Soz. 

For years, concerns about immigration en-masse have been dismissed as racist. For years, our cognitive dissonance about the mutually exclusive goals of both equality and diversity have been derided by the chattering classes whose doublethink gives them no such nausea, dreaming up ever more outlandish phrases rather than address and tackle the problem. Only this morning I stumbled on the term ‘super-diverse’ as a euphemism for conquest. 

This essay by David Goodhart, a self-confessed dupe of political correctness and the belief that liberal socialism had all the answers is a too-late confession of the intentions of a hopelessly out of touch ruling class. Dismissing the decades of concerns of those who have to live with their meddling as regrettable, I hardly think an essay cuts it. Nor does this follow-up piece in which he argues for, yes, more social engineering to create a sense of British identity. (He is, of course, plugging his semi-confessional, yet not really repentant book.) 

I say, Johnny Foreigner, do fuck orf!

What you may have failed to notice, dear boy, is that until the unwanted interventions of the chattering classes, we already had a centuries strong British identity. You may have heard of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Kipling and Churchill. I suggest you fucking read them.