le cimetière marin (la mer, la mer, toujours recommencée...)

 

yesterday a wander with TG 

here we see horsemouth out in nature. except we don't because he is in fact posing against a billboard on a building site. 

after the walk horsemouth listened to the news and had a snooze. (did he mention that the book box by aldi seems to be defunct?). he slipped into a post wander depression. he will return to reading the iris murdoch (the unicorn). additional characters have been added.

it's gone all rainy outside. 

tomorrow (as it was) 

or today (as it will be when you read this) 

horsemouth has a meeting to go to

(and then in the evening there's a zoom meeting).  

he wants to get back up on the horse of the communal endeavour and its decarbonisation. 

the communal endeavour has an interesting accountancy problem - when money from the reserves (the cash at bank) is spent it shows up in the accounts as if it were being paid out of the surplus from the co-op's normal activities (we get the rent in, we pay out the costs associated with that and the office and the staff and whatever is left over accumulates in the cash at bank as the surplus, ok ok it's slightly more complicated than that with depreciation of the assets etc, but basically so). 

consequently when the communal endeavour spend more than the surplus on anything it appears to tip the co-op out of surplus (profit) into loss. the key word to note here is appears - if the money is being paid out of reserves the co-op is still generating a surplus from its normal activities and everything is tickety-boo.

anyway the co-op needs to spend money (on staff restructuring, on insulating the houses up to an EPC C standard etc.). there are ways ('capitalising expenditure') round some of these costs (but not all of them). so the accounts will look like shit for the next few years. 

and beyond this there are the as yet unforeseeable 'events' - section 20ies (where you have to pay for repairs on your estate/ to the infrastructure of the building you own a flat in etc.). they are foreseeable in the sense that they are pretty much bound to happen at some point, the question is how big are they going to be when they come. 

whenever something happens that looks like it might be sortable with money horsemouth always regrets not arguing for the maximum rent rise possible, conversely whenever people complain about affordability he is always glad he didn't go for the highest rent rise possible. hopefully he is charting a nice sensible route through the middle of it all. 

paul valéry's le cimetière marin makes an appearance in iris murdoch's the unicorn, well at least the first four lines do;

'ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,

entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;

midi le juste y compose de feux

la mer, la mer, toujours recommencée...'

iris has ended the line with an ellipsis (it's an exclamation mark in the original). here  the sea always begins again. 

horsemouth's ear is improving (it's just the rest of him that needs treatment). horsemouth has a meeting to go to (and then in the evening there's a zoom meeting).