BT – Page 4 – derrickjknight

Problems With Networks

This morning we took a trip by car to the municipal dump which is a short distance away, between home and Lymington. Following our tidy up of the skip pile we took down the back seats of the Modus and

loaded it with the dog-sodden carpet (one of the items the previous owners had left for us thinking they might be useful); the rancid toilet seats; a few stale paint pots; bits of lino and other carpet; and a some other small objects, and joyfully tossed them into the various bays in the waste disposal and recycling centre. True to family tradition, we did not go away empty-handed, because Jackie bought four plastic window boxes from the Sales Area.
Flushed with the success of recovering the garden’s irrigation system, Jackie applied herself to the apparent ornament in the form of a sunburst which she thought must be a sprinkler.

She rigged it up, attached a hose, turned on the tap, and the sun spiralled spinning arcs of water around an area large enough to keep us leaping for dry land. There must have been a rainbow somewhere, but I couldn’t see one.

Yesterday afternoon I had begun tackling a tangled mass of ancient clematis Montana and brambles, each with stems as thick as small trees, which were pushing the kitchen garden fence onto the shrubs next door. It wasn’t long before I realised that our neighbours were suffering an invasion such as the lonicera one that beset us on the other side of our property. I needed to discuss with Bev what I planned to do. She was out. I left her a message. She responded a little later than I would have wished to start, so we agreed to meet this morning. Our very friendly neighbour was happy for me to deal with our side and said she would take care of theirs. A young horse chestnut that had no business being there was providing boughs to add to the jumble. That would have to go as well.
On our return from the dump, I got stuck in to the task. And the brambles got stuck into me. Unbelievably, three very old members of the most prolific of clematis specimens had been trained against the fence and never pruned.
During our lunchtime break our phone emitted a squeak and we lost our telephone and broadband connection. We waited a while for it to right itself. It didn’t, so I girded my loins and made the call. On my mobile, of course. BT, like all conglomerates that have outgrown their user friendliness provides a machine to respond to customers. I am sure my readers are all familiar with the rigmarole that I was presented with, so I won’t go into great detail in a rant. I will say, however, that it is no help whatsoever to be given choices of reporting either a problem with the phone or with the broadband when you have problems with both. Eventually I conveyed to the robot’s voice that we had a fault. I was put on hold whilst this was checked. Whilst on hold I was told, repeatedly, that I could go on line and use the self-help facility. The chance would have been a fine thing.
Eventually I received confirmation that we had a fault and an engineer would be arranged. Should the fault lie with our own equipment this would cost £130. If the fault was their fault I presume it would then be repaired free of charge. The problem would be resolved by the end of the day on 7th of this month.
I raged back into the garden to take out my frustration on the clematises. Whilst I was doing this Jackie came out to tell me we were back on line. The BT machine had taken my mobile phone number and promised to keep me updated by text. Or I could follow progress on the website. I wasn’t told how I could do that. I received one text confirming this. No more. Had Jackie not periodically checked, we would have been none the wiser. At no time was I ever given the option to talk to an adviser, which is what they usually call a real person.

I managed to clear two of the clematises, and to remove the offending conker tree. Whoever had trained the plants, had fixed a thick wire network reaching a foot above the six foot fence. When I came to the third tree that should have been a shrub, I found that the weight of the tangled mass had brought the top section of the network forward, so I had that vying with the brambles to take my eye out.
Already ragged from the BT experience, and letting forth a somewhat less than mild imprecation, I determined to tackle that one tomorrow;

admired the new poppies, and lit a bonfire.
Having burned some more of the cuttings pile I joined Jackie for a

delicious meal of her juicy chicken jalfrezi (recipe) which was just the job. Ice cream was to follow. I drank Las Primas Gran Familia tempranillo 2013.

Elizabeth Chose Her Moment

4th April 2014
Refreshed after the first good night’s sleep I have enjoyed in weeks, I went on an exploratory walkabout this morning.
Setting off down Downton Lane towards the sea with what I think was the Isle of Wight visible in the distance, I took a footpath leading across a field to the right. I then followed a left turn along another with a ploughed field on the left and a wooded area to the right.

As I passed a couple of Countryside Watch signs, I hoped I didn’t look too suspicious.
I leaned on a bridge across a gently flowing stream, and, as I walked away, I noticed a deposit on the palm of my hand, indicating that a bird had been there before me.
This track led me to a narrow winding road on the other side of which was Taddiford Gap car park. The road was quite busy, and therefore rather dicey to negotiate. I was consequently relieved to see another footpath to the right just past Taddiford Farm. I took it. It led through woods and, like the curate’s egg, was good in parts. It others it was a bit muddy. I crossed what I hoped was the same stream I had encountered earlier. It was, and led me to Christchurch Road opposite a rape field I had seen before from a distance, and within sight of our house.
Back home I tackled some phone calls. Today was the date of the activation of our landline and broadband. BT’s letter indicated that this could happen at any time up to midnight. I phoned a very helpful woman called Gaynor who told me the engineers were working on it. She put my mind at rest on the question of the hub working through floorboards. Apparently hers does. I had been invited to take part in a customer survey to which I had agreed. When the call about that came later, I was asked how easy or difficult it had been to obtain the help I required. I had a choice of 1 to 3 to press. Having been happy, I pressed 1 as required. The message was repeated. Three times. After which I gave up.
Pippa at Spencers had told us she could provide us with names and phone numbers of suitable people to carry out practical tasks. Since we were still getting nowhere with our Neff hobs and the Logik built-in multifunctional oven hasn’t been built in anywhere, I obtained a name from her of a man who would be able to deal with both of these and fit the washing machine. I left him a message.
Jackie worked on cleaning and sorting the kitchen whilst I cleared more space around the washing machine. This led to a major blitz on the garage. The shelf above the plumbing for the machine contained a sand-tray once, no doubt, used for potting plants, now a spawning ground for spiders, the white clusters of whose eggs lined the crevices. One heavily pregnant creature staggered away seeking shelter underneath. Having noticed the handle of a small shovel protruding from beneath garden shrubbery, I thought this might be useful for collecting up the sand. Upon extracting it I discovered it had been used for clearing up after an elderly dog. The morning’s guano was far more attractive.
On a roll, I then decided to drag out a rolled-up carpet Michael had given us. This would enable me to place some boxes of books under the shelves. However I had to reach the relevant end to tug, and clear various items lain upon it. My way was blocked by the legs of a desk balanced on top of the Safe Store book containers. It wouldn’t budge. This was because a box of books was wedged underneath it. I pulled the whole structure towards me, intending to lean the desk against the garage doors whilst I extracted the now seriously maimed box, spilling as few of its contents as possible. Elizabeth chose that moment to telephone me. Now propping myself against the desk teetering on the boxes, I fished in my pocket for my mobile phone and we had a pleasant conversation. After speaking to my sister, I completed the task and came in for lunch.

Having freed the desk, I had to find a home for it. It had always been my intention to have an office in the hall, but it was full of assorted belongings. so we cleared that, which, of course meant cluttering up other places. Never mind, it was a job well done. For there, in the middle of the wall under the bay window, just where I would have wanted it, was a lovely telephone point. Not so quirky after all.
I retrieved the home hub and telephone from the bedroom, and set it up in my now established office, this time with my iMac attached. Now all there was to do was to await the connection by BT. Then there was a shriek from Jackie. We had no electricity. The loss of power coincided with her having turned off the hobs at the wall. Fortunately we had found the fuse box. One fuse had tripped. I turned it back on. Not only did we have light and power, but the child lock had disappeared. And we had broadband. Magic.
Coincidentally, my on-line friend Jane, had sent an e-mail telling us that turning off the hobs at the wall would free the lock.
The bad news about the hobs is that they work by induction which means the pans used with them must be magnetic, so, until we buy some more suitable ones Jackie will be forced to use my heavy iron pots.
We dined this evening on microwaved fish pie and mushy peas, with which I drank Isla Negra reserva Cabernet Sauvignon 2012.

On A Mission 2

This morning I began the nightmare that is the administration attached to moving house. Most organisations prefer you to make the necessary arrangements on line, but I am of the generation that prefers to deal with real people. This is actually possible, but first of all you have to deal with a machine, You may use a keyboard, or in some cases speech, to answer the robot’s questions. At some point the mechanised voice will politely ask you to repeat either what you have said, or the number you have keyed in. If that happens more than once or twice over a particular point, you are advised to wait for an operator whilst you listen either to dubious music or advertising of the particular business’s services. If you are lucky you are told how many people are ahead of you in the queue or how long the delay may be.
Today’s experience wasn’t that difficult. It began with organising the removal service supplied by the admirable Globe removals who have moved us three times already. No problem. Once we passed the machine hoops, BT gave us a very friendly and efficient woman who sorted out the transfer of their equipment and account to be within four days of the move. Even New Forest Council had the decency to have their demands for council tax and consequent direct debits date from 1st April, to coincide nicely with our departure from Castle Malwood Lodge.
I’m bound to forget something, but at least I have made a start.
After lunch Jackie gave me a 90 minute start for a trip to just beyond Bolderwood. She then caught me up in the car and drove me to our destination and back. I walked to Emery Down by the usual route, turning right at The New Forest Inn. Had I not stopped in Minstead for a chat with Anne, I may well have reached our goal. As it was Jackie reached me just a mile from the Canadian Cross.
My readers are more than acquainted with the huge corpses of forest trees and their crudely amputated limbs that littered this stretch of terrain. Pools of still water lay beside them. I suspect it was peat that lent its tincture to some of these glassy patches.
A young and beautiful white pony ambled inquisitively across the dried bracken and watched me walking past.
My Facebook friend, Barrie Haynes, who once lived in the area, had asked me about two maple trees planted either side of the Canadian Cross. He wanted to know how they were surviving, and I undertook to investigate. The Cross is the centrepiece of the Memorial to Canadian Servicemen who lost their lives during the Second World War whilst contributing to the struggle, the outcome of which made my upbringing much safer than it may have been. Barrie wrote that ‘the story goes that two Canadians came back many years [after the memorial had first been erected], looking for the original cross (which had rotted away). When the new cross was first set up, the maples either side were stolen’. They were subsequently replaced.
I am happy to report that the trees, although leafless at the moment, are thriving.
Please spare a thought for Rene Fournier and his compatriots.
This morning’s tussle with technology was a sweet dream compared to the nightmare that beset me when I began to draft the latter half of this post. iMac’s Safari would not load the page. The message they gave me was that the server had discontinued, probably because it was busy. I was to try again in a few minutes. I did so several times over the next hour. Then I had the first of my brilliant ideas. Perhaps it would work on Windows. It did. Oh joy. I could then write the text. But what about the photos? They were on the iMac. No longer on the camera so I couldn’t try to load them onto my HP laptop. I always delete them from the camera once I’ve put them on the computer.
Then I had my second brilliant idea. I could -mail the photos to myself, put them onto the HP desktop, and upload them to WordPess from there. I did send them successfully. But how, on my newest equipment, was I to transfer the pictures from the e-mails? I couldn’t fathom it.
But. Wait a minute. Do you feel brilliant idea number three coming on? I did. I still had my old Toshiba that Becky hasn’t yet collected. I knew how to do it on that. I thought. In fact I’d already forgotten, but I did manage it.
I couldn’t, however, do much with the image sizes, so I hope you will forgive me. In any case, I trust you will appreciate the effort that has gone into illustrating this post.
The superb bottle of Pomerol, La Croix Taillefer 2007, given to me by Shelly and Ron for Christmas, accompanying Jackie’s liver and bacon casserole (recipe), went some way to alleviating my suffering.
As did the WordPress support system. I had alerted them to my problem. Whilst I was completing this piece, David from WordPress came on to chat. He confirmed what I had been beginning to realise, which was it was an internet compatibility problem. He sent me a link which may help. I’m not up to pursuing this tonight. We’ll see what tomorrow may bring.
P.S. At 3 a.m. the next morning, waking up thinking about it, I rose from my bed and tried the link. It advised me to clear my Safari cache. This seemed a pretty scary thing to do. But I did it anyway. And. Blow me. It worked. The result is I have been able to reformat this page with larger photographs.

Holly’s Beauty

Light rain began to fall just as I left home to repeat the walk I had taken with Matthew and Oddie on 7th. This precipitation was to take the form of intermittent showers for the first three quarters of an hour or so. During the few periods when the sun pierced the grey cloud cover, the hedgerows, now counting convulvulus among their constituents, glistened with the raindrops. Not having the excuse of Mat’s ageing little terrier to call Jackie to collect me from the bottle bank, I had to walk the final stretch up Running Hill as well.

Once I had emerged from the forest at Little Chef I was alongside the A31 for a short time. I passed that building, the Travelodge, the Esso garage and various houses which are found roughly at the area where the signs to Stoney Cross bring the hopeful traveller.

What is now a major East/West dual carriageway has very little in the way of pedestrian thoroughfares. The derelict footpath from just past the Esso garage to Forest Road betrays the fact that ordinary people without cars once trod this way. Now it is only people like me who venture along it. A row of hardy hollyhocks, having escaped to the central reservation, clung to the thin soil as passing vehicles did their best to create enough turbulence to tear them up.

I exchanged waves with a woman working in a garden not far from a tall, isolated, house called Rufuston that seems to have its own Royal Mail collection box. The name must come from the nearby Rufus Stone (see post of 19th November last year). As I reached this house I paused to photograph it. The woman tentatively, with a quizzical look, approached me from my left. She wondered why I was taking photographs. It seemed a reasonable question really, especially as it was her house whose image I had just pocketed. My explanation of what I was up to must have reassured her, for we parted pleasantly and she expressed the wish that the weather would stay fine for the rest of my walk.

At the bottom of the hill that leads from The Splash to the Furzey Gardens junction, Tim was digging mud out of the ditch that leads to his farm. This trench joins a pipe that runs under the road. Like the ditch, the pipe was full of soggy earth. Tim was working to clear as much as he could from the ditch and the underground pipe. I have before wondered whether there was a machine to carry out this task. If there is, Tim wasn’t aware of it as he plied his garden fork. Although the farm is his, he said the land on which the road lies belongs to the manor, the owners of which, in his view are responsible for the clearance. Apparently in the old days there was a villager with a technical title Tim couldn’t remember, whose job it was to keep the ditches clear. Tim also told me that the two goats and few sheep on his little farm are what might be called rescue animals. The goats were found abandoned as kids some fourteen years ago near Godshill; the sheep were ailing as lambs and bottle-fed in the same haven. I joked that if I found any stray creature in the forest I would know where to bring it.

This afternoon was spent once again grappling with security problems with BT e-mail accounts. Firstly I received one of those hijacking missives purporting to come from someone in urgent need of money. Because the whole e-mail address of the sender is taken over by these evil scammers, any reply never reaches the alleged originator. It goes to the crooks. This happened to Louisa a year or so ago. Chris and Frances were said to have been mugged in Rome where the Embassy was unhelpful. Chris was visiting our mother in West End at the time. These messages are instantly recognisable firstly because anyone in such dire need would use the telephone, and secondly because the English is so appalling. Neither Louisa nor Chris would write so badly. The whole business is a dreadful headache for the true account holder, because it affects everyone in their address book. All contacts are lost.

As I was contemplating the plight of my brother and sister-in-law I received an e-mail allegedly from Yahoo! Customer Care which seemed to me to be equally spurious and contained the usual booby-trapped ‘Click here’ message. It had not even been put into the Spam folder by BTYahoo! mail. I smelt a rat and phoned BT. When I finally got to an agent he said he didn’t deal with such technical matters and consequently put me in a queue for technical help. It took some time before I got a person, who didn’t know whether this latest message was Spam or not. After I read it out two or three times, pointing out the errors and where it didn’t seem to make sense, she decided it was more likely than not to be a scam. She advised me to put it into the Spam folder and send it to abuseadbt. I asked if that was all one word and we managed between us to establish that it wasn’t. The ad bit was the symbol @. When I asked how I was now to have any faith in BT security she told me that she herself had been unable to receive messages for six months because she had been hacked and her password rejected, until suddenly it was accepted again. This failed to reassure me.

I had opted to take part in a telephone survey after the call. It consisted of a triple choice questionnaire, 1 for good, 2 for bad, 3 for unsure; followed by an opportunity to make recorded comments about why I had scored it as I did. I took the opportunity. In the midst of this, despite the repetition of how important and helpful my views would be, I must have run out of time, for I was cut off in full flow. It was a machine that conducted the survey. I don’t think it was programmed to register when it has interrupted the customer and call them back to offer more time. Either that or I upset it when I mentioned that a difference in accents of spoken English makes for a certain difficulty in communication.

I am not convinced of the security of my e-mail account. I cannot understand how the survey as performed can be of benefit to anyone. BT, if you read this, I am open to all attempts at reassurance on either matter.

Of all the different varieties of fuchsia Jackie has been growing in her pots, the one the blooms of which she has most eagerly awaited is named ‘Holly’s beauty’ (otherwise known to her as Orlaith). This has come into its own today.

This evening we dined on Jackie’s chilli con carne and pilau rice. My drink was Chilano cabernet sauvignon 2011 and Jackie’s was Hoegaarden.

A Ring Of Truth

Early this morning Jackie, Don and I shopped in Acres Down Farm shop and went on to All Saints Church, first described on 24th December last year. While Jackie diverted to Minstead Village Shop, Don and I wandered around the churchyard in bright sunshine, before we all three explored the inside.

Particularly interesting to our friend was the ‘blasted’ yew, a seven hundred year old tree that fell apart some years ago and regenerated itself. The wild flowers now in evidence include clover , dandelions, daisies, and buttercups.

When we returned, I decided to tackle the problem of a rejected e-mail password. This time I got BT’s representative on the telephone to reset a completely new code. As usual, Jackie being the primary account holder, he needed to speak to her first. Unfortunately he got the wrong end of the stick and changed her password. This required putting right and involved a box filled with ‘funny writing I can’t read’. All this took time and I had to interpret the ‘funny writing’, fortunately getting it right. The man kept having to put us on hold and check with his supervisor. Eventually he returned to me and reset the replacement password. It worked. For about an hour. Then the new one was rejected. I have now come to the conclusion that my BT Yahoo account has been well and truly hacked. I can’t face it any more at the moment. So don’t send me any e-mails.

My head still full of the computer problem, I sat in the garden watching the birds with Don, whilst Jackie prepared the evening’s barbecue. The company and avian interest helped calm me. Don is one of three friends I have who are pretty knowledgable about birds. He helped me distinguish between the various tits who visit the feeder. I observed that it was becoming possible to identify birds some distance away on the lawn by their outline shape, their posture, their gait, and how they hold their tail-feathers. Apart from the pied wagtails, the blackbirds brought me to this conclusion.

Talking birds with Don, it was natural for me to mention my friend bo Beolens, who has written a number of bird books and who, as Fatbirder, runs an international birding website. This turns out to be one of Don’s favourites on his computer. I proudly brought the site up on screen and showed him the Lesser Antillean Bullfinch which illustrates bo’s Barbados page. The photograph was taken by me in Barbados in 2004, when I was there to see Sam arrive at the end of his Atlantic row.

Late in the afternoon Becky, Ian, and Flo arrived with Scooby and Oddie. We then enjoyed the various sausages, chicken tikka masala and array of salads Jackie had produced in the kitchen. That seems to me to be the sensible way of preparing a barbecue.

On 28th March I described how Matthew’s dog, Oddie, always dives into my chair whenever he has the chance. Because Mat and Tess are on their way to visit Sam and Holly and their children in Croatia, Becky is looking after Oddie and therefore brought him with them today. Would you believe it? Even in the garden he nicks my seat.

It was natural that with Becky and Don together, we should tell some Lindum House stories. One of today’s was of the intruder. One balmy evening as we sat in the snug watching television, about twenty years ago, we heard someone coming down the stairs. As usual in the summer, we had left open the double doors at the front of the house. A young man was then seen to walk past the window, making his way to the bottom of the garden. I set off in pursuit. He started running. So did I. After him. He began to climb the fence between us and the Parletts in Lindum Street. I grabbed him, pulled him down, and frogmarched him into the house. Calling out to Jessica to telephone the police, I sat on him at the foot of the stairs.

I soon realised he was drunk. He kept going on about a fishing contest with the Working Men’s Club. After the event, he and his friends from Grimsby had gone off drinking in Newark. He was making his way back to the Club. His team coach was parked outside in the road. It dawned on me that all this had a ring of truth. It would be easy enough for me to take him out to check on the coach. I asked Jessica to cancel the emergency call. She attempted to do so, but it was not possible. It stands to reason, really. The uninvited guest could have been standing with a gun to my head. Actually he was lying between the bottom step and my embrace. For the whole forty five minutes it took for the officers to arrive.

As, after satisfactory explanations, I took him up the drive to the open gates, down the path towards us walked about five of his mates. They had made the same mistake. And sure enough, there, on the road between us and the Club, was a coach. Lindum House, you see, was a Victorian reproduction of the former grand Georgian house next door that now hosted social activities of the town’s working men.

The Story Of The Raincoat

It is many years since I visited the cinema during the daytime, possibly not since my teens. Emerging from the gloom of the colonnaded arbour that is Running Hill in leaf bearing a steady drip of rain from the now adequately dressed branches of the trees, the dazzle of the new road markings at Seamans Corner reminded me of the blinking reaction on leaving the darkness required for viewing the silver screen and encountering the sunshine of London streets. There must have been some bright days in the 1950s. Many of the cinemas in their heyday had doors near the gents marked ‘Push Bar To Open’. This was how you got out. It was also worth sussing out before you entered, because if someone had not closed it properly you were in in a flash. I’m not much of a cinemagoer now, and receive enough pocket money, so I wouldn’t know if this method of ingress and egress still exists.

As I returned up the hill, having, appropriately for today, walked ‘The Splash’ ford loop, I was reminded of the times there were problems with the film projectors in my youth. Sometimes the reel just snapped, sometimes it needed replacing. A grainy crackling would be heard and the screen go blank. It was just like the splattering of the rain on the canopy above my head.

When we lost the picture, there would be catcalls and we would all look up at the projectionist’s window. Through the fanned out beam from his equipment threaded wreaths of cigarette smoke, just like the swirling spray obscuring the vehicles in front of us on the M27 during today’s later drive to Hedge End to buy Jackie’s birthday present of bird-watching binoculars.

16th April 2009 was a very different day in Bergerac than it has been this year either in Hampshire or Aquitaine. This was the day I bought my French raincoat. It’s a pity it wasn’t a trench coat. Wouldn’t that have rolled off the tongue? The purchase was recorded on 24th. Elizabeth was there, with Chris and Frances, to witness the event. She can even prove it, for she took photograph number 19 in the ‘through the ages’ series, after the thunder storm that made it necessary. She had been there, moments earlier, in the glowing sunshine smiling down on Bergerac old town, as I walked away from the pigeons towards the glorious flower displays which she subsequently immortalised. Then, my maroon velvet jacket sufficed.

In order to do this post justice, Elizabeth sent me her photographs by e-mail. Nothing, of course goes smoothly on our broadband, so once again BT rejected my password and refused to deliver this evening’s illustrations. I had my routine conversation with the technician who took over my screen and solved the problem. Given that I was rather less than patient, his tolerance was greatly to be commended.

Jackie provided a liver, bacon, and sausage casserole with a plentiful variety of well-timed vegetables followed by rice pudding, for our dinner tonight. Lovely grub. I drank some Carta Roja gran reserva 2005. I’ll be sorry when Sainsbury’s stop selling that at half price.

Have I Simply Gone Mad?

A robin and a blue tit saw off a nuthatch from the bird station. Really it was the robin who did the business, the tit being like the little kid who eggs on the bully to snatch some of the glory. The robin then stood guard, looking threatening, while the tit, knowing he didn’t belong in the same space as the toughie, head deferentially bowed, waited his turn. Modern technology found a wonderful new way to send me ballistic this morning. We received a phone call from the handyman who is to fix a few things in the flat. One item was not on his list. Since, without the agent’s say so he could not fix it, unless we contacted them we would need to continue flushing the lavatory with a piece of string which gets soggy if you drop it in the water. Rob, the handyman, asked us to call the agent. That was when the fun started. After dialling the number I was asked by a machine to enter my password. Well, how do you do that on a mobile phone? I also had an e-mail telling me the device would not receive messages because the password was incorrect. Thinking this may have been to do with my having reset my e-mail password on the BT account, I followed the directions given to do that. I was not allowed to do it that way, so I tried another. The new password was rejected, and the phone locked. Now, my mobile phone is on an O2 account, as my regular readers will already know. The home phone, in Jackie’s name, is a BT account. So you will be able to imagine my surprise, and mild expletives, when I got the same password request on the home phone. My expletives became even milder when Jackie got the same response on her pay as you go T-mobile. Eventually, I received a call from the home phone on my mobile. Jackie had now discovered that that had begun to work without the machine’s interference, as had her mobile. I could now receive calls, but access nothing else on my locked phone. There are seventeen apartments in this building. During this fiasco our entry buzzer was activated. Hoping it was our Rob, Jackie answered the door to a deliveryman who was trying to access number 15. Ours was one of only two buzzers he had managed to get to work. Rob arrived in good time. He was unable to access the loo until I got out of the bath. My ablutions had been delayed by the shenanigans. Whilst soaking comfortably I contemplated ‘Murder In The Lounge’, posted on 25th August last year. That story was about a cat fight. What I didn’t mention then was that the people next door were out when I returned the perpetrator’s collar, so I put that through the letterbox and left an answer phone message. My neighbours did not receive the message, and what is more, their entry phone did not take messages. Nevertheless, as I pressed the buzzer, a machine from inside the hall asked me to leave a message. So I did, and when I heard nothing more from my neighbours whose cat, after all, had left my sitting room looking like a pile of feathers after a predator had made a kill, I thought that rather churlish of them. So, did that buzzer short circuit with the telephone, or was the timing pure coincidence? And, if that was possible, could the deliveryman, trying all the buzzers in turn, have managed the same thing? It was, after all, only after he left that Jackie managed to use the phone. Or have I simply gone mad? Never mind, I thought, the birch on the lawn now sports fresh green leaves, and the sun casts its rays through our huge mullioned windows. There was, however, nothing remotely amusing or cheerful about the way the rest of the morning was spent. I was rash enough to telephone O2 about the locked phone. First of all the advisor suggested the earlier problem must have been related to the number we were trying to ring. That made sense to me. She then took me through the very lengthy process of unlocking my mobile. I had to enter, ten times, the password that kept showing up as incorrect. She could then reset it for me, but all the information carried by my phone would be wiped. I did this, and watched all my contact information; e-mails; saved messages; texts; and anything else I haven’t thought of, represented by a black line progressing across the screen. Twice. When she reset it, the password I had been using all along worked. Perhaps I have gone mad. This is exactly why I have always been reluctant to keep all information in my mobile phone’s memory. But I’ve often been a bit lazy in this respect. So, if you ever want to hear from me again, please send me an e-mail with your contact details. If I don’t receive any of these, I will know where I stand, and I just don’t know what I’ll do with myself. After lunch, with all this buzzing in my head, Jackie drove us to Elizabeth’s, where she continued planting bulbs and seeds and I cut the grass. This was slightly problematic in that I couldn’t get the mower going again. I was just about to throw in the towel, when, realising that would only clog up the works even more, I remembered Elizabeth’s technique, displayed on 20th, of pushing the machine along, jerking it up and down. A few yards of shoving what looked like a giant snail with hiccups did the trick. We were pleased to see the early, red, rhododendron has benefited from the bracken compost and the removal of diseased buds last summer. Before I could put my mind to this, I gleaned some family phone numbers from my sister and inserted them into my mobile. If you are a family member do not assume I now have all your details. Danni cooked a superb roast chicken dinner with all the trimmings for the four of us. Pudding was apple and blackcurrant pie. Danni and I drank McGuigan Estate shiraz 2012; Jackie drank Hoegaarden; and Elizabeth drank water.

Just To Wind Me Up

It was a long morning. Knowing that Matthew was coming straight on here for the weekend after dropping Tess and Jo off at Gatwick airport at 5 a.m. got us up early. Mat and Oddie arrived at 6.45. Soon after this I realised it was also a cold morning, and indeed, the harsh weather is back. So, when Mat, Oddie and I walked down to the post box and back, I regretted not wearing an overcoat. Incidentally, have you noticed how often a dog cocks its leg when traversing new territory? Especially when Oddie is on a lead, we have to wait for him every time he adopts his seemingly unproductive three-legged ballet stance.

We then had a trip to Romsey where Jackie and Matthew wanted to arrange an Interflora bouquet for a funeral. A suspicious e-mail caused some delay with this. When Jackie logged on to check the florist, she discovered she had a message purporting to come from me. I had apparently sent this spurious message to myself and three others in my address book, including my French branch of Barclays Bank. This required a call to BT who reset my password to ensure that this did not happen again. Naturally it meant going through all the usual choices offered by a machine, then a wait for one of the advisors, all of whom were busy at that moment. Never mind, I am well used to this now, and the man I eventually spoke to, by the now familiar process of taking over my screen, sorted the problem. Fortunately I realised I would have to change the passwords on each of my e-mail accounts. Had I not done so I would have probably gone ballistic when trying to access e-mails on my iMac.

When we eventually did get to Romsey it was cold enough for me to feel sorry for the market stallholders. After arranging for the flowers to be sent, we wandered around the town, where Jackie bought an hydrangea from one of the stalwart sellers to plant in a rather beautiful pot that our neighbour Jean had brought all the way from Australia. On a nearby fruit and vegetable stall, two young men displayed all the usual patter associated with the East End of London, ‘like budgies, going cheap’, for example. Seeing delicious looking pies on another we rather regretted that our freezer was full. Whilst watching Jackie make her purchase I became engaged in an interesting conversation with two women, probably mother and daughter. As the younger one walked past me, she half turned, without looking at the person she was addressing, and said ‘you don’t do that at my house’. Sensing she had made a bit of an error, as the older woman followed on, I replied ‘I’ve never even been to your house’. This caused some amusement. Having woven their way through the stalls, they approached in a similar manner from another direction. This time it was a question from the daughter. ‘Do you want to go to Waitrose?’. ‘No thanks’, was my response.

Jackie and Matthew both rather like the Daily Mail crossword, so we had to buy the newspaper and take it to Lineker’s cafe where we drank coffee. For once in my life I was pleased to tackle this puzzle, just to keep warm. I hasten to add that neither Mat nor his mother are fans of the newspaper, but they do, unfortunately, like its crossword. We know that, on such an occasion, there will be much amusement as I complain about the terrible clues, which would never get through my usual editors. We take it in turns to write in an answer. Almost invariably I explode at my turn, with such as ‘it’s got to be this word; but this or that is wrong with the clue’. The glint in Matthew’s eye was not just because he was struggling with a clue, but it is his standard expression for when he has sussed his photograph is being taken. There was a campaign in London, designed to shame people into drinking less. Posters carried a picture of a recycle bin full of wine bottles and drink cans. The caption indicated that the householders were known to like a drink. For that reason I always feel rather embarrassed when there is a Daily Mail in our transparent recycling bag.

Back home we lunched on marvellous pasties, sausage rolls, bread, and salad Mat had brought from the Upper Dicker Village Shop (see 12th May last year). Continuing with the puzzle afterwards, Matthew made a point of seeking out the worst clues, just to wind me up.

Jackie made an excellent lamb curry followed by bread and butter pudding for our dinner. Matthew and I drank Piccini Montepulciano d’Abruzzo riserva 2010. Oddie had Butcher’s Senior beef, liver, and rice.

Junk From George Osborne

This morning I finished ‘Wordsworth, A Life’ by Juliet Barker. That was essential because otherwise I would have had to weigh down my hand luggage with it on the plane to France tomorrow. The book comprises 971 pages of very small print for this modern age. Maybe the font size was chosen in order to restrict it to one volume. Even skipping the notes, index, etc,, that take up the last section, I had to get through 810 pages. This required the stubborn determination of a Cancerian marathon runner. Full of dense detail about the man and his extended family the tome is a tribute to the research skills of the author, and the fact that I did want to complete the task of reading it is thanks to her powers of writing. Being fairly familiar with the Lake District and having read much of the subject’s poetry also helped. Maybe I should have been more fascinated by some of the more peripheral characters.

My readers will know I enjoy illustrated books. I prefer my pictures to appear interspersed with the relevant text, so that every now and again I get a pleasant surprise. What I don’t like are sections of photographic reproductions in two or three chunks, which usually means you are treated to portraits or views that you have not yet read about. There were two of the latter clusters in this volume. Of course this is also a matter of cost, so I shouldn’t be mealy-mouthed about it. I enjoyed the book.

The rest of the morning was spent sorting out technology. I have realised that for some weeks now I have not been receiving e-mails on my Blackberry. Since I am off to Sigoules tomorrow where the Blackberry is my only e-mail source, this has become quite important. The BT Yahoo icon has also appeared on the mobile device. This made me think that the problem had arisen as a result of sorting out the password problem with BT which involved linking to a Yahoo account.

Given a choice between O2 and BT help lines I decided to try my luck with the former. This was definitely the better option. Dean, of O2, established that my Yahoo account had not been activated by Blackberry. As I never use it I wanted to get rid of it. This wasn’t possible without the password. Now which one would that be? I gave the young man the most likely key with a couple of alternatives. None of them worked. He tried the most likely one again. No joy. He said I would need to ring BT to check the password and he would call me back in fifteen minutes.

Well, after the last time I wasn’t going to go through the palaver with BT again, and anyway it would take much more than fifteen minutes. So I had one last go with the most likely password. This time it worked. The most amazing part of all this was that Dean did actually ring me back on time. He tried the password again. It worked.

Now all I had to do was take the battery and SIM card out of the phone after we’d finished speaking and put them straight back in again, then wait twenty minutes to start to receive new messages. The back of a Blackberry is like the inner sanctum of Fort Knox. I couldn’t take it off without reference to the instruction manual. Even then, it was tough. The battery then slipped out easily enough. But the SIM card was firmly locked in a strong box. I managed to prise it out a bit but a metal band held it in place. Imagining that I must have broken whatever was the crucial circuit, which would have been tantamount to taking the card out altogether, I reassembled the device. 76 messages came rushing in. These were the old unread ones. I had lunch, after which a new message came in. It was junk from George Osborne, but it was a message.

I then accompanied Jackie to Sainsbury’s in Ringwood to replenish provisions devastated by the Easter family influx. On the verges of the A road and roundabout approach to the car park are planted ‘a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils’. I wasn’t exactly wandering ‘lonely as a cloud’. In fact I had to dance between cars on their way to the West Country to approach them. It has been a happy coincidence to finish the Victorian Poet Laureate’s biography in April, thus giving me the opportunity for a cheesy personal link with another, better known, rambler.

This evening Ali and Steve drove from their home in Clutton to the Aroma Bangladeshi restaurant in Shaftesbury. Jackie and I drove to the same venue where we all met and spent a very enjoyable evening over an excellent meal, Cobra, and Bangla beer.

My First Match

Today Helen and Bill, and Shelly and Ron came for the afternoon and an evening meal. One of the underlights had blown, so we made another trip to Homebase at Edge End, for replacements. It seems that we need replacement bulbs or strip lighting on an almost weekly basis at the moment, and, although we always buy some spares as well, the next one we need is invariably of a different fitting or length from those we have in our expanding stock. This particular light was so old, probably thirty years, that the holder was stiff and brittle, and kept cracking and shedding bits. After unscrewing and taking it down, because we are both too tall to bend and peer underneath the cupboards, we were still at a loss. I was all for asking the agent to have these fittings changed. But Jackie wanted her kitchen today and was determined to see the job through. I left her to it. She fixed the tube in place and only needed my help to screw it back.

Before we left Shelly had phoned to check when they were expected because Ron, a cub master was taking his boys on a hike this morning. This led me to reflect on my own brief sojourn in the cubs. I hadn’t really wanted to join and only did so to please Auntie Gwen. It seemed to me that weekdays at school were where I experienced enough regimentation. So I always arrived late and mucked about a bit. What finally earned my expulsion by Akela, was chucking bits of screwed up paper at other boys when we were sitting round in some kind of circle for some purpose which I cannot remember. That was definitely a result. I must have been about nine.

But that was not quite the last of me and cubs. The Rowe family were friends of Dad’s. Dickie had emigrated to New Zealand after the war, but we still kept in touch with his sisters. One, Ivy, was an Akela. The adults had the bright idea that I might like to join her pack on a camping holiday. I remember three things about that trip. One was cherryade; a sweet, sickly fizzy drink that everyone was addicted to. The second was that I was so homesick that Mum and Dad had to come and take me home after three or four days. I think Dad used his furniture van for this, but I can’t be quite certain. Last, and most definitely not least, was an even more embarrassing experience than having to be fetched early. There was a cricket match. I had never played the game and knew nothing about it. There was no place for me in a team. ‘Never mind’, said the organiser of the event. ‘You can be umpire’.

I was placed behind the stumps at the bowler’s end. I stood there vaguely looking interested. My reverie was soon shattered by an awful cry, something akin to ‘aarwozeeee’. I stood there definitely looking red-faced and nonplussed. I did nothing. I said nothing. I saw nothing. I wished I’d heard nothing. ‘Put your finger up’, said one of the fielders. ‘Which one, and where?’, I thought. The other boy helped me out by indicating the correct procedure. So I put my finger up. Nervously. And got a tirade of tearful abuse from a batsman who then trudged off to the edge of the field. I cringe now as I think about it.

Early this afternoon I decided to tackle the internet problem once more. I turned on the iMac and phoned BT. There was a twenty minute wait. I made good use of this by reading the booklet that came with the Home Hub. This spoke of a ‘Wireless Key’ needing to be used. When speaking with Apple yesterday I realised I may be engaged with someone in America, who was not familiar with BT Hubs. He confirmed that it should be the BT Password that we had been using and had been reset. The word on the screen was ‘Password’. So what if I entered the Key instead of the password? I was in the process of doing this when an assistant became free. It worked. That must have been the quickest call she’d ever made.

Now I can’t even get e-mails on my laptop, being told my own account password is incorrect. I wasn’t going to start all over again today, so will ring BT tomorrow.

The purpose of the sisters’ visit was the grand rugbyfest. The three men watched the afternoon’s rugby while the women played Scrabble, with Jackie periodically attending to the meal. Jackie, Helen, and Shelly had realised they were each going to be rugby widows for the afternoon, so they decided it made sense to do it together.

We then spent an enjoyable evening centred around a tender roast lamb dinner, followed by apple and blackberry crumble. Various red and white wines were drunk.