Neo-Classical Sardine-Tin Swimming Pool

Did you watch Grand Designs tonight? it featured a chap called Dean Marks who had a passion to convert an unloved Georgian Church into a family home. He's a builder and he decided to go it alone, no conservation expert to guide him, no architect to create the design, he did all this himself and got planning permission for his design through 300 meetings with the planning officers.

Some of the things he did, were not to my taste but I would have never had tackled what Dean and his wife Hilary did, because I don't have the vision or the imagination or the drive to do it myself. His love of the building and his strength of vision were stunning. There were times when Kevin McCloud visibly blanched as Dean outlined his vision for the building but he shouldn't have worried too much. Dean saved the building he went to the experts when he knew he didn't have the skills, he listened and learned from it and he gave his family a house in a million. I was entranced the determination, the blind optimism, the canny reclamation and the sheer determination had me won over.

Dean - I salute you!

Grand Designs

I watched Grand Designs on Channel 4 tonight.

The programme featured Ben Law who until he built his house in 2002, had lived, for the previous ten years under canvas, in broken down old trailers and in benders amid the woods he owns, works and tends in deepest stockbroker land. He fought a long battle with the local council to get planning permission to build his cottage.

Using traditional methods and as much natural, local material as he could, he and a band of volunteers built the cottage in the most sustainable way possible, the walls are straw bales covered with lime plaster on the inside, clad with planks externally. The insulation in the roof shredded newspaper. Solar panels and miniature windmills to generate electricity, a composting lavatory and an old rayburn cooker to provide hot water and to cook on.

When the programme was first shown I was really taken with the house, the whole way of life even. But I couldn't live like that, not for more than a week. Having to stoke the rayburn to have hot water, hoping that there has been enough sun and wind to recharge the old batteries so that there will be light in the evening. No telly or really energy hungry appliances. I just couldn't do it.

One thing that struck me when I watched the programme before was how thin he was and ever so slightly unkempt, with this revised repeat we saw him in his cottage garden, a riot of colour and cottagey type flowers that would bring a tear of joy to Alan Titmarsh's eye. Ben looked more rounded less haunted more comfortable and better dressed.

This is where the tear came to my eye because I'm an old softie and I love a happy ending, in the intervening years he had met the woman of his dreams married and when the cameras had turned up in June this year was the proud father of a 19 day old son.