黑洞社区

Lean times

Chief construction adviser Paul Morrell was the main speaker at 黑洞社区鈥檚 annual terrace reception at the Houses of Parliament on Monday, where he outlined his plan to knock 20% off building costs. But guests were not expecting him to personalise his quest the way he did - Morrell pledged to lose 15-20% of his body weight 鈥渙ver the life of the parliament鈥�, to prove that things that were leaner could be 鈥渕ore beautiful鈥�. A few glasses of chardonnay later, Rudi Klein, director of SEC Group, Nick Taylor, chief executive of Waterman Group, and Dominic Helps, consultant at Corbett & Co, made the same pledge. Any other takers?

Good to share

David Pretty, former chief executive of Barratt, had a send off last week to mark his retirement from the New Homes Marketing Board - and the industry. His leaving do at the Mayfair Hotel was a chance for him to tell a few stories, mostly about the day he sold a home to Margaret Thatcher. He said the message from his boss, the infamous Sir Lawrie Barratt, on that day was: 鈥淒on鈥檛 screw up, David.鈥� Pretty couldn鈥檛 resist a final swipe at his old firm, reminding everyone of Barratt鈥檚 share price the day he left: nearly 拢13. It is now hovering at about 拢1. Unfortunately his successor, Mark Clare, was unable to be there to hear it.

How clean is your site?

Here at 黑洞社区 Towers I am uniquely placed for a bit of lunchtime people watching: office workers jogging along the Thames, couples walking hand-in-hand in the unseasonable rain - and workers on the Blackfriars station overspill site hurling leftover poles and rubbish into surrounding bushes. It鈥檚 an interesting tidying-up method on the site, run by Balfour Beatty subcontractors. They even used a crane to dump a metal cage into the foliage. The area now looks like a kind of post-Glastonbury wasteland. But credit where it鈥檚 due: before the workers left last week, they were kind enough to remove one item - a football lodged in the bushes. Balfour Beatty promises to 鈥渢ake appropriate measures鈥� to deal with the mess.

Clean up on aisle 4

Consider the worst thing that鈥檚 happened to you in a supermarket. They鈥檝e run out of Coco Pops? The queue for the till is winding past the cheese counter? Surely, not a fridge exploding? A chap from Asda claimed at UBM鈥檚 Supermarket Conference in London last week that two of its rivals had problems with the new eco-friendly fridges they鈥檇 installed - namely, that they had been known to explode. 黑洞社区 is unable to verify the claim, but next time you pop to your local for some milk it might be wise to use a long pole with a hook on the end.