Turn barbers into a museum – it was a cut above the rest!
IREMEMBER Cyril Raby as a jovial Father-Christmas-type character with a delightful sense of humour. My mother would send my brother and I to the barbers by ourselves to get our hair cut. I must have been all of six or seven.
Whilst waiting my turn in the chair, Cyril would often break off from his customer and peak over my shoulder to read my Beano, which I had just bought from Barrowclough’s newsagents across the road.
I recall one occasion when I had just bought the latest edition of “Goal” football magazine. Every week there would be a centre page photo of a football team. This week it was the great Second Division Championship-winning team Huddersfield Town. Cyril eyed this mischievously and said it would look great on the wall of the “Wooden Hut”.
He offered to buy it from me – he offered me three shillings! I held on to it tightly and said “No”. It was going on my wall. (I could have popped back across the road and bought another copy– it was only one shilling and sixpence!)
I never became a world-famous entrepreneur, but back in the day my hair always looked neat and tidy. And it did again when his “young assistant” cut my hair some 50 years later!
The Wooden Hut needs to be preserved in its entirety, fittings and all, perhaps in some local museum.
It is a magnificent piece of local history. £8,000 to £18,000, while ground source heat pumps costs can range anywhere from £20,000 to £35,000. These figures were based on a two-three bedroom house.
The main difference between running a heat pump and a gas boiler is you do not get that immediate boost you can get with gas, when you feel cold and fire up the boiler. That is because a heat pump heats water in the radiators to a lower temperature than a gas boiler, so it warms a house more slowly.
Given the Government are talking of giving a £5,000 incentive towards people switching from gas fired boilers to electric air source heat pumps, can people still afford to switch?
Like the subsidies for electric vehicles, which I and many others still cannot afford, heat pumps place me in a similar position.
One thing of note, will I get a warm feeling knowing that I am subsidising through my taxes people who can afford these changes?
I have a sneaky feeling that those thoughts will not be keeping me warm during the winter months.
Martin, via email
heat pump, insulation and solar panels in which I invested my retirement money, and we are now in the lucky position of having no gas and the company now pays us for our electricity.
And contrary to what Martin writes, we are warm all winter long.
It is also very good news that Kirklees is at last doing something with its green homes at Fartown (Pilot project for new carbon neutral homes, Examiner, Saturday, October 16). I hope they move rapidly from a pilot to having every new house in Kirklees an air source heat pump and solar panels.
Stephen Dorril