Let me ponder

The meaning of life!

My Children with their new baby Brother

They came for a weekend visit and love their new baby brother














It was a great weekend, shame it was such a short visit, they are coming back though, for new year.

Merry Christmas to anyone reading this

Had a rather nice day, spoilt only by a rather sad experience around 5ish which I will talk about further down.

Surprisingly, Alisons two children were up quite late for a Christmas day, in fact I had to go and shout a big Ho Ho Ho through their bedroom doors to wak them up!

We had a rather excellent Christmas dinner at The Hobby Horse followed by a trip up to see her mum, dad, sister and sisters boyfriend.

Then back here for Doctor Who, which I thought was a fine tale, cybermen, a mysterious 2nd Doctor played by David Morrissey, and Dervla Kirwan being a superb evil nemesis.

I'm now finally able to relax with a beer or two having been chaufer for the day.

The sad news is we had to watch what by all accounts was a good pub, the Rock and Fountain, burn down. I've never been in myself, and now it looks like I won't be able to for quite a while.

I spotted the fire from Alisons mum and dads house, some 700 feet down in the gorge below, and was just deciding it was a proper fire rather than a bonfire when we saw the fire engines turn up. By the time we had to leave the roof was completely gone across the top of the restaraunt part of the building, somehow I imagine they won't be open again any time soon.

It looked like the building was empty, so I am hoping no-one was hurt, I'm sure I will find out fairly soon.

Anyway, Merry Christmas again, and a Happy New Year.

Traffic Noise

It's probably just me, but there is something different about traffic noise in London compared to anywhere else I have been.

Maybe it's simply the constant traffic, but I am not convinced, it just sounds different to traffic noise anywhere else I have been.

Have you found Jesus?

Well? Did you?

We're offline

Thanks to the wonderful behemoth called British Telecom we have not as yet had either our telephone line or broadband connected.

Apparently they fluffed the order and forgot, so we wont be reconnected to the world until the 11th

This is ridiculous, the original transfer was supposed to take 4-5 working days but correcting the error will take them 12 days? this does not make sense.

When I moved house back in 1996 NTL (now Virgin Media) took 3-4 HOURS to transfer my account, Telephone, TV and Broadband the lot.

I do wonder at the complete waste of time British Telecom are, what is there to do that takes them so many days that NTL didn't have to do? I suspect bureaucracy, old fashioned equipment and general "we're the monopoly, and we don't give a shit" attitude.

Down here in Wales there is no alternative, everything has to go down BT wires, oh to be in Leeds with proper fibre optic cable based Virgin Media, cheaper, better quality broadband and far far better customer service.

This post is being written from Alisons mums house where thankfully we have a backup broadband line.