Amateur Brain Surgery

Do you live in a  listed building?

The Nurse does. But her home is no picture postcard… she often wonders, in her more cynical moments, who on earth dreamed up the idea of listing a prison. But then again, maybe it isn’t that much of a surprise. The UK’s listed buildings regulations contravene common sense and logic in many interesting ways.

It might seem hard to believe, but The Nurse has a Mum. Even psychopathic monsters have mums.  The Nurse’s Mum lives in a pretty 17th century Grade 2 listed cottage. A lovely house, but the listing is causing The Nurse’s Mum all sorts of grief.   

If there’s one thing that makes The Nurse furious, it is a lack of common sense. Here are two of the finest examples she’s come across for a very long time:

1. You are not allowed to fit double glazing in a listed building. This means that The Nurse’s Mum, against all logic, is prevented by law from insulating her home properly. In effect, she’s not allowed to be green. Or warm… her heating bills are unneccessarily high as a result, which is stressful for a seventy year old lady.

2. You can be forced to install aesthetically inappropriate windows! The Nurse’s Mum installed expensive, beautiful 17th century style windows during restoration, before finding out that the building was listed. Now she is being forced by law to replace them with Victorian-style sash windows… in a 17th century cottage?! Where’s the aesthetic sense in that?  It’s wrong, wrong, so wrong. 

Ooooh! If you could actually see how cross The Nurse feels about this daft situation, and you worked for English Heritage, you’d be fucking scared out of your wits. And rightly so. They’re a disgrace.

Sometimes even The Nurse herself acknowledges that she’s probably better off here, at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, rather than loose-cannoning around in the world at large putting things right like some horrifying version of Robin Hood…