They told me that it would cost just as much to replace the fascia boards and put back the old gutters.
A: One problem is that although it is theoretically possible to reuse old gutters, doing so without bending them is very tricky.
Ask around the neighborhood, put a request on Freecycle, Craigslist, or similar, or place a notice in a local community center asking for old guttering.
It was a battle of the ageing frontmen: Iggy, the 63-year-old gutter punk, crawling around on his hands and knees to I Wanna Be Your Dog; Bruce Dickinson, 52 this week, the consummate showman, standing high above the audience, conducting a sea of hands for The Number of the Beast.
One never really sees 40-year-old gutter punks, yet here I had found the coelacanth of crusty punk-rock idealism.
The tour ends in an experience that must move the most curmudgeonly: a scramble back up to the 21st century from the lowest part of the alleyway, which survives unnervingly intact, 17th-century stone underfoot, the 300-year-old gutters still a hazard to the unwary, and the brick walls, shuttered windows and battered but handsome doorways still rising high overhead.
"Shackles" were bits of old metal guttering.
As a child, he spent one summer digging a "coal mine" with his friends, using an old piece of gutter for the chute, a neighbor, Lena Stover, recalled.
Clean your gutters Old frisbees.
Poetry had become a kind of Wall Street of the soul, full of pushy young brokers intent on sweeping the old guard into the gutter.
