And another thing.

Scroll down to the entry for 3 December for the Annual Ramblings

Occurs to me that I haven't had a good grizzle for a while.  So here goes.

We have given in to the blackmail of my esteemed ex-employer and shelled out for a new 12-month broadband contract, since we were about to be made to pay through the nose for going over our meagre monthly download allowance.  I couldn't face the aggro of configuring someone else's router.  The web site provides a button with the legend 'upgrade now' or some such.  Needless to say it didn't work: it's evidently only for upgrades from a lesser package than we were then on, though that is not made clear.  I therefore had to phone them: and after the usual lengthy press 1 for broadband, 2 for tea, 1 for no sugar, this-call-is-being-recorded-for-obscure-and-irrelevant-purposes etc finally got connected to a brain-free zone that read the scripts in that depressingly familiar moronic sing-song fashion, generally asking each question three times.  Since it's a new contract, our call package suddenly doubled in price, and although we got a 'free' new router, we'd be billed £6.95 for postage and packing.  We decided not to install the new router until our visitor had gone, so it was Friday afternoon when the problems began.  The late mediaeval desktop upstairs gave us no trouble, and Martyn's computers, both kindles and my mobile phone similarly behaved.  But the laptop would offer nothing but facebook.  I tried doing a restore, failing on two occasions until I temporarily suppressed the virus catcher.  The third restore worked, but left me with no internet access at all.  Eventually a BT pop-up screen duly popped up, and after clicking on a random collection of buttons, I was back in business.  Phew.  On the positive side, the new router is compact, replaces both the old boxes, and is mercifully free from flashing lights.

Wet weather yesterday prompted Martyn to do some channel zapping on TV, and up popped a programme about a procession of Eddie Stobart lorries down through France for a photoshoot at the magnificent Viaduc de Millau.  Riveting content, eh?  Well, there were some nice views.  OK, if you don't know French, you can't know how to pronounce Millau correctly.  But why can a programme get on air with Millau repeatedly mispronounced as though it was somewhere in Germany?  Isn't there some kind of sub-editing process to eliminate such clangers?  We found ourselves yelling at the box: 'Me-yoh, you ignorant twat!'  Deep sigh.

Traffic hereabouts gets worse and worse.  We made the classic error of trying to get to North Farm one day last week and gave up when, an hour after leaving home, we hadn't got as far as the sewage farm.  Yesterday, the main road out to our place was clogged up with roadworks and the consequent alternating traffic, so we struck off into the village instead.  There, the High Street was clogged up by two 281 buses going in the same direction (it's a 12-minute service, which illustrates just how clogged up it was), and the side streets were gridlocked.  When someone finally gave in and reversed, we got moving only to meet a vast 4x4  whose (blonde) driver insisted on squeezing through with millimetres to spare.  One gets a feeling that it would be better to leave the car in the garage for the month of December.  Or better still, hibernate.  Snarl.