Hi-tech shambles

It's been cold of late.  No massive surprise there, I suppose.  It is December after all, but it's been quite a warm year, so winter's tendrils felt particularly unpleasant.  Saturday in London was a charming day, full of winter sunshine and with a festive dusting of frost.  But festive comes at a price, and that price is draughts.

Despite living a new-build house, the missus and I have noticed that the front door area tends towards the draughty and unpleasant during cold spells.  Being a modern house, ours has eschewed the traditional porch or hallway off the front door that the Victorians favoured.  The thinking behind this is to maximise the space one has to live, front and/or lounge in, and this the configuration does admirably.  Unfortunately it also means you've only got a sliver of wafer-thin mdf between you and the great outdoors.

I took to the web to find solutions for this modern architectural foible.  Apparently the only option is to buy a new front door, which runs to about £500.  Or one can lag the inside of the shit door with space-age thermal lining.  Sadly, that stuff costs a fortune too, and one then has to fit it, which looks tricky to mine untrained eye.

In desperation, I decided to line the inside of the portcullis with cushions.  I don't know why but we seem to be overrun with cushions; people keep buying them for us.  We're both quite thin, and obviously look like we need upholstering.  We'd recently had a cull of unused scatter-cushions and the condemned ones were piled up in the front room, waiting for the end.  I simply stacked a couple up against the inside of the front door, like a brightly-coloured, flaccid flying buttress.  The result?  Instant draught-free comfort.

My spirits were lifted immeasurably by this small victory for cheapskate lateral thinking.  Some much we encounter in modern life is disposable and impossible to fix, needlessly so too.  Why does it take a degree in engineering and one hundred man hours to replace the battery on an iPod, for example?  There's no reason why it should be so difficult.  What it does do of course is put you off trying it yourself.  No, chances are you'll leg it down to Currys and buy a brand new replacement.  That might be good news for Apple, but it spells disaster for the environment and for you bank balance.

I'm no anarcho-syndicalist, but I am suggesting we wrest some power back from the man and his corporations by changing the batteries on us own consumer durables.  Take to the barricades, brothers.