Up and Down

I've been escalated! and I've been diminished! both in a very good way. BT have finally realised the sheer futility of sending no fewer than seven Openreach engineers one after the other who all arrive and ask innocently, What seems to be the problem? because they haven't been briefed first!!! So I've now spent 56 hours waiting in for them: they always say they will come any time between 8 and 1, but it's normally 10 to 1. Frustrating phone calls to India have got me nowhere, but on Tuesday morning the kindly young engineer told me I really needed a broadband engineer, the next step up from him and his mates, and so I reported this to India when they phoned last night for the umpteenth time to see if my woes were now over. A quite different sounding man, not reading from a script I now know off by heart, ran a series of tests and told me that, yes, my line was dipping in and out and there was a fault. Yes! Yes! I'm to be escalated, he told me. If he'd been in the room with me I'd have crushed the life out of him in a love squeeze. Lucky man then. Watch this space.

The first dramatic cuts

Neatly Clipped

And my hedge has been decimated, shortened by up to 15 feet in places and denuded of brambles. The difference in my already brighter than bright kitchen is remarkable, but best of all I won't have to watch the sun go off my summerhouse at around 4pm in the height of summer. Four men in hard hats wielding chainsaws up ladders and a tractor with a cage on it made mincemeat of the hedge, and created a lovely big heap of firewood to boot. I had to ask the men to log up more wood than they planned to, understandable perhaps since the boss man Philip supplies all my firewood. It's a win win situation for me, to employ a cliche, and I'm over the moon and nothing like as sick as a parrot.