Gather ye round for ghost stories and seadogs’ yarns, from tales of the living dead at the SEC Group to night-time sabotage on the briny. Thank goodness we have some illumination from the RIBA …
Throwing his top hat in the ring
I ran into Denis Walker at a bash recently. In case you don’t know, he’s the chap from the business department who’s in charge of choosing a chief construction adviser – so of course I asked him how the selection process was going. “We’ve been inundated,” he said. “The standard of applications has been very high.” But then he paused and frowned, as though locked in some strange inward debate. Then he asked: “Who would you suggest for the role?” Modesty forbade me from mentioning it, of course, but there is someone with more than 160 years of experience in the industry who really ought to be in contention …
A dazzling refurbishment
A source inside RIBA’s Portland Place HQ has contacted us about the refurbishment of the building opposite, designed by Ken Shuttleworth’s Make. The Make-over (sorry, couldn’t resist) was completed last week and consisted of wrapping the sixties building in extremely shiny gold cladding. The result is that it “reflects a lot of light into the faces of people working in RIBA offices, which can get pretty annoying, especially when it’s particularly sunny …” No wonder RIBA staff have given the building the unaffectionate nickname of the Cadbury’s Crunchie.
Count Klein
I was a little spooked to hear that Building columnist Rudi Klein has been measured for his own coffin. Apparently the chief executive of the Specialist Engineering Contractors Group has even tried out the box for size. I know that his recent attack on the JCT contracts provoked an angry response in our letters pages (24 July, page 45), but surely Klein is not that worried that a disgruntled lawyer will have him silenced … Or is it that his Romanian ancestry, of which he’s never made a secret, hails from closer to Transylvania than he has previously admitted …
Pirates of Penson
Poor sportsmanship was witnessed at last week’s Little Britain regatta, when sailors surreptitiously renamed Penson Group’s boat.
The furtive wordsmiths attacked the architect’s vessel while it was moored in the harbour, using black tape to change the letters along the side from the company name to a word for a part of the male anatomy beginning with the same letter. While we admire the physical and mental dexterity of these linguistic pirates – the lettering was changed on both sides of the boat, neither of which was adjacent to land – their identities remain concealed. However, I hear that the boat had a run-in earlier that day with a particular contractor, which might shed some light on later events …
Model behaviour
Emily Maitlis, one of the presenters of BBC2’s Newsnight, was a speaker at the Partnerships for Schools 2009 conference last week. Pondering what life would be like under a Tory government, she promised the audience that they would have the chance to “look at some Swedish models later”. Sadly, she was referring to the Swedish education system, in which Michael Gove, the shadow education secretary, is taking an interest. After waiting patiently for the raucous laughter to subside, she said: “Let me rephrase that …”
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