“I want to be an architect, so that I can design hideous buildings that people loath, that are out of step with popular culture, the environment and everything around them”. Said no-one, ever.

Way back in the mists of time, before t'internet took over our lives, when 'blog' was just a funny-sounding word, I wrote an Editor's Comment about the fact that Travis Perkins, then the country's 3rd largest builders merchant, had resigned from its own industry organisation.

That nice man Brandon Lewis has said that as far as he is concerned a successful housing plan under the Tories will see the building of 1 million homes. Yes, One. Million. New. Homes.

Those of us who grew up in the 1970s will remember the excitement - depending on your age - of going to bed by candlelight because there was no electricity that evening.

Planners and planning departments come in for a good deal of criticism from the building community. And rightly so in a good many cases. The planning laws can be said to be archaic, overly complicated, onerous and enforced by people to whose heads are full of the little bit of power they have been granted.…

We have something of a housing crisis in this country, which seems to be a fact universally acknowledged.

Figures released today show that 'winter deaths' in the year 2014-2015 were the highest since 1999. 43,000 'extra' winter deaths is the chilling (sorry) headline.

I wrote most of this blog this morning (November 25) before the Chancellor released his Autumn Statement. To be honest, I wasn't really expecting to have to rewrite it in the wake of an announcement about a massive injection of infrastructure spending into energy efficiency. But it would have been nice.

I have harped on here before about how rubbish some companies can be when it comes to customer service. And now I have a new bug bear. It is the crimes against common sense that are committed every day under the guise of the Data Protection Act. The way that some customer service departments hide…

The question many of us are asking is, can there be any more of the wet stuff left in the sky? Surely, we say to each other, there can be no more rain since I has all fallen into our rivers, canals and field, soaking the ground and making 'squelch' the sound for January.