As you may have gathered, being stuck in a cell for a week is giving me a lot of thinking time. Kennels is most certainly not like the place I used to stay at in Belgium where I could spend all day playing with other dogs. This is not a good option compared to being at home. Anyway, I’ve been peering out at buildings I can see from here and noticing what work they need doing to them. I did the same the other day when I was lying down in front of the pub waiting for my Mistress to come out and sit with me. If you look really carefully at an old building you can see all sorts of places where the bricks don’t match or where the lines aren’t straight and you say ‘it has character’. On a new house you say ‘it has been badly finished’, so what’s the difference? I can agree that where brickwork needs re-pointing it is just in a bad state of repair and needs a little loving care, but should someone make the bricks match better where a window or doorway has been bricked up? There are thousands of people living on modern housing estates who never see anything like that as there aren’t any old buildings round them. On the whole even from a dog’s perspective that is very sad.
The crazy thing is that because it is regarded as character you often can’t get permission to knock them down and start again either. I think you have to wait until they fall down before you can actually do anything very radical with them. I wonder if it’s cheaper to renovate an old tumbledown building or knock it down and start again from scratch. I think I might quite like to design something to my own requirements.