There is deliberate built-in obsolescence in all manufactured goods today, almost without exception. Nothing is manufactured to last the presumed length of its constituent parts made of quality materials. Quality has been abandoned for cheap quantity and quick turn-over. In the field of electronics and ever-evolving technologies this can be understood to a degree.

But consumers are led down the garden path by unscrupulous corporations who specialize in unveiling the very latest in the always-competitive, always-emerging field of cutting-edge technology, with cut-throat tactics to ensure that one always has a leg up on competitors anxious to shove the leaders off the top ledge of 'superior products', beloved by a consuming public.

Little wonder we've become such mindless consumers. We should demand more and better, however; not more products, but higher expectations of what we take to be durable products, which turn out to be nothing but. Take, for example, standards in house construction. While in some ways these have advanced, in many others they have turned a retrograde step.

People seem to think there is nothing amiss when a relatively new house presents with the problem of deteriorating window frames. Window frames now passing muster - and have done so for a generation - meeting required standards made not from solid, aged wood, but finger-jointed wood. Which may sound all right, but isn't. Because finger-jointed frames are vulnerable to deterioration; they haven't the fundamental characteristics of sold wood which can withstand moisture infiltration.

Which explains why so many of our neighbours have, over the past ten years, been paying tens of thousands of dollars to have their windows replaced by companies cheerily accomplishing that for them, in recognition of the inadequacy of building code standards for new housing. Old homes whose window frames were built of solid wood, are not decomposing at the rate the new homes are.

Which explains why, despite looking after the windows of our twenty-year-old house, by regular inspections, cleaning and painting, we have discovered yet another window where the wood has turned to pulp and requires replacing.