• Tables
    What a great day at the auction! We’ve been wanting to change our dining room table for years. We inherited my Mother-in-law’s Ercol dining room set, which may well be a design classic, but isn’t very functional. When we have friends or family round, we have to put an old fire door on top, which makes it a bit too high for comfort and seems too big and yet somehow not big enough at the same time.

    I saw a perfect table at the auction rooms yesterday, took a photo and convinced Mrs Rayner that I should have a go for it. Okay, so it’s repro, but I’m not proud. It’s a very good quality repro in perfect showroom condidtion. The original catalogue came with it telling me it was made in 1983 of solid wood and veneer, no chipboard in sight and originally cost £350! How much would it cost now?

    I knew that similar things might come up in 7harity shops for £75-100 and set my limit at £100. There’s 12.5% buyer’s premium plus VAT on top of that, which comes to about £130. The old pine table, the lot before, went for £150 so I wondered if I should set my level a bit higher.

    I waited to see where the other bidders came in. “Come, on!” said the auctioneer. “Someone start me at £5.” I flashed my card. Some one else flashed theirs for £8. I flashed mine again for £10… and that was it! £10 for perfect regency mahogany repro – I couldn’t believe it.

    I was so pleased that I bought the lovely little pine writing desk that I had admired too. It sat in a dusty corner and was referred to as a school desk. It’s much posher than that. I got it for £12 brought it home, cleaned it up and gave it a dose of beeswax. Now it’s looking beautiful.

    My friend, Andy came with me in his estate car to fetch it home. He’d not been to the auction before and was fascinated by the way the worlds of agriculture and home furnishings collide in such a place. We turned it into a day out by having a fry-up in the canteen – chips and all.

    So why so cheap? For one thing, no one sits down to eat anymore. People eat standing up or from a tray on their lap. We sit down as a family every night and have a roast on Sundays. How do you get the family gossip if everyone is watching the telly? So who needs a dining table? And who needs a repro? The pine kitchen table was obviously going to a old house, to traditional, farmhouse-kitchen kind of people – so there is a demand for tables like that. But not for repro dining room tables. That’s why they usually end up being given to charity shops.

    As for the writing desk. Well, who writes anymore? Who needs a sloped desk? We all take the supper trays off our laps and replace them with laptop computers now. That’s why so cheap. Supply and demand. There just ain’t no demand anymore.

    Incidentally, my best bargain was the sideboard behind the table in the photo. It cost me £20. When I got home I found an envelope hidden under a drawer that contained 2 £10 notes. I got it for free!

  • It’s amazing what you learn by looking closely at website statistics. If you have read more about this blog, you will know that I was badly hacked last month and had to rebuild my website. I concluded that my self-hosted blog running on WordPress had been the backdoor in for the hackers as all the symptoms were replicated on other websites that were run on WordPress.

    I moved my blog to wordpress.com, who host it and keep it up to date and, hopefully safer from intrusion.

    I was looking through my new website statistics this morning and thought, “That’s a lot of 404s.” 404 is the code for a page that is not found when someone directly asks for it. With a new website structure, I would expect quite a few 404s from people who may have now out of date files bookmarked on their browsers. It these were all case like that, I was frustrating a lot of people.

    Many of the 404s came from tiny graphic files that I had stripped out of the site design. I’d not stripped them out of the CSS though, which is still calling for the files when you enter any of my pages. That should sort out a lot.

    But woah! 91,627 attempts to reach a file called /wordpress/wp-includes/Text/update.php. That must be the vulnerable file in the set up I had at the time I was hit. I’ve had a further 1225 requests for my old WordPress login page, so someone must be trying to get in manually.

    Then I had 1135 requests for /Contact/files/paypal/cgi-bin/webscrcmd=_login-run/webscrcmd=_account-run/updates-paypal/confirm-paypal/Thanks.htm. I don’t know if that string of letters means anything to you? It does to me. The guys who hacked me were running a spoof paypal site on my site. When you get those annoying emails from PayPal saying that you need to change your pin number or whatever, it is false site like these that you are sent to.

    How I was supposed to know where to find it? It was hidden away in a most innocuous folder. All I knew was that my ISP shut me down for suspicious behaviour. Whatever I did they got back in. Somehow, they had got their own account on my site control panel and could do what they liked.

    Looking at my referrers stats, I can see some very strange sites sending people to my site. They are middle eastern hackers sites. My site is written up there as having been hacked, open and available. They are still sending people to me and no doubt they are still trying to hack their way in. What did I ever do to upset them?

    But that’s the point, I’ve done nothing to upset them. They don’t care a toss. They might fly under some bogus cause, but really they are just callous criminals, using any site they can crack into to steal money of the unsuspecting.

    It’s amazing the story a few lines of code can tell. A bit CSI, eh?

  • I’ve just finished The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House,which my daughter gave me for Father’s Day. I didn’t know anything about it, so I approached it as a who dunnit – which is not what it is, so part of me is feeling a bit let down because I was waiting for the great revelation, which never came and was never intended to come.

    It’s a wonderful, forensic study of a horrible Victorian crime. It shows us that the obsessions of the press, (and their readers) are the same now as they were then. I was surprised by the compassion shown to the guilty party. We have been brought up to believe Dickens was Victorian Britain – Jarndice versus Jardice – lock’em up and let’em rot – but it’s good to know that sympathy could also be added to the mix where justice was concerned.

    Nothing much really changes. We think we are so clever and modern, so different from our ignorant predecessors. While we are still Human, we can always learn from the lessons of the past. there is nothing new under the sun.