Last week ended with an interesting all-day seminar, ‘New Homes and our Health’, organised by the Good Homes Alliance to celebrate their 10th birthday. It covered everything from the importance of planning for extreme weather events (heat, cold and flood), the benefits of encouraging walking and cycling, to mitigating the nuisance noise of Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery (MVHR), and the causes of indoor mould.

Talking about a recent summit in Helsinki, Fred London of JTP showed a slide in which all the delegates were on their feet. Not a standing ovation; just normal practice in Helsinki to stand up for the questions between presentations. Why? Because standing for 3 hours a day adds two years to your life! Fred urged us to do the same and we duly obeyed…

In a final effort to make sure we clocked up our full quota of healthy activity for the day, we made sure we left at least an hour for wine, beer and nibbles at the end (standing up of course!).