On reflection

I confess to having been very happily surprised by the response-time of Darth, the freeholder of the building in which I live, to my recent alert about a leaking roof. It took him (and his delightful side-kick, Zara) a good six months to accept responsibility for the loft above my flat, which happened to be host to a large colony of pigeons. This time around it has taken less than a fortnight for him to send round some contractors to assess the problem.

While I waited for them to arrive I looked out of my window, the easiest place to point out the location of the problem. To see the guttering I need to twist my neck upwards and to the right, but if I twist my neck horizontally to the left I can see across the river Medway to my office. I have never seen the river so still that it cast reflections before, so I whipped the camera out.

Nik & Nok arrived promptly a moment-or-two after 9am. It came as absolutely no surprise at all to me to be told that the ONLY access to the roof of the entire building is up through the hatch in my hallway, across the loft above my flat (which is not integral to my flat) and out through the recently sealed faux-dormer-window onto the parapet. So! Zara! Get your head around this; not all liars get to be Prime Minister.

Nik & Nok were delightful, and one or other of them was tickled pink by Veera's sash. I left them to it and cycled to work.

Mid-morning I received a call from Darth to let me know that Nik & Nok were out on the roof, which is smothered with pigeon-shit. Slippy when wet. So today Nik & Nok have been bagging up wet bird-turd and leaving bags out on the roof. 

Tomorrow (when it is suggested that it might be a little less wet) they will bring lengths of rope with which to lower the shit-bags to street level without the need to cart it all manually down the communal (carpeted) stairs, or erect scaffolding.

Good!

Then they can begin the process of finding the leak, which could simply be a result of guttering blocked by wet bird doo-doo, or it might be some faulty flashing. I suspect the former.

Really we could use a bird of prey to encourage the pigeons to find a different roost.