Cleaners who go to great lengths
The modern window cleaner has come a long way since the bucket of soapy water and a squeegee, and a new range of equipment has made it safer and easier to clean high-up windows.
Modern pole systems feed water up the pole to clean and rinse windows and hardto-reach glass. These extendable poles clean with brushes and pure water. This method requires 100 per cent purified water, filtered through reverse osmosis, to remove impurities in the water and dry smear-free.
each set-up is designed to clean specific areas, and professionals have several poles of various lengths with different brush-bristle types. Today’s carbon-fibre poles are light, flexible and durable.
until recently, the longest pole on the market was the 72ft evolution Pro Plus water-fed pole (RRP £1,799 excluding VAT), and it’s still considered by many to be the best. But it has recently been surpassed in height by the Ionic Swift 80ft-pole (£1,350) which can easily deal with cleaning windows on an eight-storey building.
When windows, fascias and cladding can’t be reached by a wash pole system or ladders alone, cleaners use mobile elevated working platforms, truck-mounted platforms, spiders, cherry-pickers and scissor lifts which can extend the reach to 110ft, or a ten-storey building.
James Edgerton, Edinburgh.
QUESTION What is the longest telescopic pole used by a window cleaner? QUESTION Is it true that Wordsworth was an anosmiac (i.e. had no sense of smell)?
SEVERAL contemporaries recorded Wordsworth’s anosmia. The poet’s nephew Christopher Wordsworth noted in his Memoirs of William Wordsworth: ‘With regard to fragrance, Mr Wordsworth spoke from the testimony of others: he himself had no sense of smell.’ Wordsworth himself never referred directly to having this condition and evokes the use of smell in various poems, including The Prelude.
In it he compares the grace-under-adversity of his friend Michael Beaupay to the enhanced smell of ‘aromatic flowers on Alpine turf ’.
In the late poem Devotional Incitements (1832), flowers thrust priests from their altars and odours ‘rise in mute aerial harmonies, from humble violet, modest thyme, exhaled.’
Perhaps Wordsworth’s ability to express the sense comes from an unusual incident when he was apparently given a single chance to experience it.
his friend and fellow poet Robert Southey recalled in a 1822 letter: ‘Wordsworth has no sense of smell. once, and once only in his life, the dormant power awakened; it was by a bed of stocks in full bloom, at a house which he inhabited in Dorsetshire, some five and 20 years ago; and he says it was like a vision of Paradise to him: but it lasted only a few minutes, and the faculty has continued torpid from that time.’
Dora Maybury, Abberley, Worcs.
QUESTION Who is the current Baron von Richthofen?
WORLD War I fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen (1892-1918) was a Freiherr, a title normally translated as ‘baron’, but, though similar in rank, it differs from the British baron.
The style Freiherr originally implied a dynastic status, and many Freiherren were counts without taking the title. But once the more important of them started styling themselves counts, the Freiherren sank to become an inferior class of nobility.
unlike our barons, all male members of the family were entitled to use Freiherr, so all male von Richthofen were Freiherr. under Article 109 of the post-World War I Weimar Constitution of 1919, the German Republic legally incorporated all hereditary noble titles into parts of the surname. had he survived the war, Freiherr Manfred von Richthofen would have become Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen.
There are several Freiherr von Richthofen, many descended from the Red Baron’s brother lothar-Siegfried Freiherr von Richthofen, also a WWI fighter ace, who fathered two children before he was killed in a commercial airline accident in 1922.
Doctor of law hermann Freiherr von Richthofen (born 1933) was German Ambassador to the UK from 1989 to 1993, his name making him quite popular in the newspapers at the time. The von Richthofen family archive is managed by Dr Karl-Friedrich Freiherr von Richthofen.
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