1st floor, ladies and childrenswear, going up......

This weekend sees the first of a series of tower runs, as focused hill runners charge up the 42 flights of stairs in , wait for it, Tower 42 in the City of London. The male winners are expecting to do it in about 4 minutes. That's ten flights a minute, one every 6 seconds!!

It takes me back a few years, this tower running, and like a lot of things the youth of today think they invented, they didn't.

In 1982, a chum of mine, Neil Brown and I embarked on an adventure to the Far East. We were both single having recently come out of relationships and decided to go away for a few weeks. Our mate Figs fixed us up with accommodation in Singapore with AMF Phil, a Spurs supporter, and we made our own plans from there.

We were both fairly fit blokes so to break up some of the days we decided to have our own 'SuperStars' competition over the duration of the holiday. We started off with swimming which I won by virtue of doing the breastroke leg first, and holding Neil off on the return freestyle. He then trounced me at tennis, even after giving me a 0-40 start each game!

His racquet skills came to the fore again in the squash, but it was a close fought thing which finished when my bat smashed against the wall in the deciding set. We were in Penang, Malaysia by now, having tied the beer can pyramid competition on the train from Kuala Lumpa.

The hotel had a giant chess set in the grounds, and so we incorporated that into our competition. We set up after breakfast and gained a few interested parties as they made their way to the beach. Imagine their surprise then when we were still playing when they trooped back for lunch.I managed to dig myself out of a big hole to win that one, which left Neil and I all square as we returned to Singapore prior to our flight home.

Now Phil and Anne, our hosts, lived on the 32 floor of a condo somewhere down Nathan Road so it seemed sensible to have a decider by running the tower. So Phil went down in the lift with each of us in turn and timed us as we charged up the stairs. It was close, but Neil beat me to take the FESP trophy and the bragging rights.

The difference of course with Tower racing is that everybody starts off at the same time, imagine the scrum at the first corner eh!

And now the weather in Norwegian

I am finally immortalised on YouTube.

I really thought I was doing well with the Portuguese bit, but when seeing it now it was a fairly disjointed stumble through the guttural and the expressive. Still, I tried and it was appreciated by the key participants and the locals.

Next challenge is to play the piano at number one daughters wedding next year. 'Chopsticks' might not be enough, so I need to start banging those ivories soonest.

Put another jumper on

The Eastern European meter reader turned up at the door last week and I am waiting with much anxiety for the bills to arrive. I pay both gas and electricity by monthly standing order, so every now and then I get a wacking one off payment request to balance the books. I suspect it will arrive any time.

We have been in the house for about 8 years now and have three sources of energy drainage, The swimming pool, the domestic hot water and the heating. In that time my monthly outlay has almost doubled, so I have been motivated to investigate some of the alternative heat sources which are becoming the subject of much media discussion.

There are really only a few that I can consider, thermal/solar panels on the roof, a wind turbine on the house, or free standing in the garden, and a ground source heat pump.

The swimming pool would struggle to be heated by solar panels in the conventional way as the heat exchanger would need to be about twenty feet long. It would also struggle to work effectively during the Winter months. I could use it as a giant water storage source but the temperature would likely exceed the recommended level for the liner. Ground source heating is therefore the preferred option here.

The central heating is a real tricky one. The ground source heater would be able to do the necessary if we had under floor heating, but traditional radiators need much higher levels of heating to be able to heat effectively.

The domestic hot water could be supplemented by the solar panel solution, and that in turn could offset some of the central heating requirements by keeping the cylinder at a higher ambient temperature. we shall have to see.

All these systems will need pumps, so the attraction of wind power to reduce the electricity consumption has certain appeal. We don't live in Hill House without some blowy days. The trouble here is that the Energy Saving Trust web site is inconclusive when I enter my details, and when I discussed the matter with them they indicated a wind survey lasting a minimum of a year would be the best thing to do before outlaying the expense associated with a turbine.

So I await details of companies who can provide such surveys, but I have been more successful with the other alternative sources as I have convinced a local ( well Welsh) company to come over next week and chat through what I could and could not do. The roof should take panels if the sun can get to them enough, but the garden is too small for a wired ground source system, so it would need to be bore holes. I await his comments with interest.

On the day British gas reduced their prices by 7%, but pundits were predicting a 25% cost hike over the next ten years, it is certainly time for Maison Weathers to join the 21st century