Mending roofs is the whole of what happens here. It is not a way in to selling you a new one. Southport is not a wet town by North West standards - it is an exposed one. There is no high ground between here and Ireland, the prevailing wind comes in off the sea carrying salt, and the sand off the dunes gets into everything. The Victorian villas of Birkdale Park, the shallow-pitched bungalows behind Ainsdale and the postwar estates inland each fail in their own particular ways, and we have completed over a thousand repairs learning where. Nobody charges to come and look, the written figure is the one you pay, and if the answer is that it can safely wait, that is what you will be told.