We here at EG are used to looking at the scale of UK residential development through particular prisms: how it will help address the housing crisis; what it means for the quarterly figures of major players; its impact on the environment.
We have been remiss, however, in failing to consider another profound effect of the housebuilding boom. This neglect must end now.
Thanks goes to St Modwen Homes for highlighting the pressing need to answer the big question: how does a rapid rise in households across the country affect Santa Claus’s Christmas schedule? St Modwen has tracked the number of new households year-on-year since 2000, calculating how much extra time is needed for Saint Nick to stick around the UK delivering presents before continuing his global mission.
According to projections, by the end of 2021, the country will boast an additional 289,000 homes since the year began. And this will delay Santa’s departure by all of… 86.7 seconds. Underwhelmed? Well, the housebuilder is quick to remind us: “While a minute-and-a-half doesn’t sound like too much time to squeeze in, consider the fact that Santa can only spend 0.0003 seconds per household to deliver all the presents in the world.”
Consider it considered. And, incrementally, it all adds up. Father Christmas now spends over 18 minutes more in the UK each year than he did in 2000.
And, St Modwen adds, “As the UK aims to increase its homebuilding capacity, Santa will need to be nimbler on his feet in future.” Which will not be helped by the firm’s other finding: in 2021, the jolly old fellow will eat an extra 65,314,000 calories worth of mince pies and drink 27,455,000 calories worth of milk. That’s more than gets consumed at an illicit Downing Street Christmas party.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year
No, not Christmas – that’s still two weeks away. We mean the pre-holiday period, when our inboxes swell like stockings, full of Yuletide press releases. And yes, like the traditional lump of coal, there is a Diary staple.
Having checked our records, it has been a whole two years since we updated you on the market for houses in streets with festive names – so it is a very good thing indeed that the hard-working elves at HeatingForce.co.uk have done all the work for us, calculating which examples make homeowners the merriest.
Top of the tree when it comes to festive street names is Toy – which, if you have it on your road sign, boosts your property price by a whopping £272,249, to an average of £660,798. Kids’ stuff, that is not. A distant second in the list (but, in Diary’s opinion, much more Christmassy) is Tinsel, adding sparkle to values to the tune of £90,465 – ahead of Frosty (£70,479), Gingerbread £65,224 and the route-one option, Christmas (£41,074).
Stocking and Snow are the other real winners, so, if you’re still searching for that perfect present for the special person in your life, dig out an atlas and find a suitably festive house in your area – it’ll be the gift that keeps on giving.
Weathering the storm
Moving into a new office can be challenging at the best of times. Most will expect to come across some difficulties with setting up technology, getting the air-conditioning set to the ideal level and adapting to a new working environment.
However, hardly anyone would expect to have to deal with the weather. Spare a thought, then, for Grant Thornton. During the move to its new 11th-floor office in Manchester, GT was kept “pretty busy” with managing its external areas as an early winter came to the North.
“All working well, no real technical hitches so far,” Carl Williams, managing partner for the North West, assured EG. “Obviously, Storm Arwen at the weekend tested us: we’re on the 11th floor, so we had to bunker down a few things on the balcony. But that was the only challenge so far.” With Storm Barra following fast on Arwen’s heels, it might be best to keep those hatches battened down.
Left in the dark
One would think, almost two years into the pandemic, that everybody would have the hang of video calls by now – but still Diary’s meetings are regularly punctuated by the familiar cries of “you’re on mute”.
Then there is the contact (whose name we will protect, to spare the shame) who this week appeared with a completely black screen on a Microsoft Teams call. Luckily, all we needed was the audio, but still it came as something of a mystery to our interviewee.
Later, we heard they had finally cracked the problem after three hours and numerous calls to tech support, who, eventually, successfully diagnosed it was a hardware problem.
A very basic hardware problem. “I hadn’t noticed that there was a slider that manually covered the camera,” they tell us. “D’oh! Must have moved it when I cleaned the screen over the weekend…” A lesson to us all – never clean your laptop.
