Rogues Gallery

Nowadays when they build mean little terraced rabbit hutches (no disrespect if you’re forced to live in one) they call them ‘town houses’. Amongst other problems, like paper-thin walls and nowhere to put the washing machines, these ghastly houses have no chimneys and no gable walls, and thus nowhere to fix an aerial. What’s more the inhabitants are usually young couples, clinging desperately to the bottom rung of the property ladder, mortgaged until the pips squeak and thus skint, so expensive aerial installations are not an option.

The installer here has found a solution. He has fixed a 13” cradle bracket (meant to go on the corner of a chimney) to the boiler vent, using lashing wire. This is so unorthodox that no-one can possibly know whether or not it is safe. My instinct is that given the size of the aerial it is roughly like Cunard reacting to a gale warning by carefully tying the Queen Mary to a dockside parking meter. It has provided a fixing for a horizontal mast when a vertical one is needed, so the polarisation of the mast has been modified by the use of brute force and ignorance, two of the cowboy installer’s best friends. Note the badly weakened section, reinforced (ha!) with insulating tape. Actually, looking at the main picture the tape seems to be spelling something out in Morse code. Does it say C-O-W-B-O-Y?

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