View From The Window

Well, what will today bring, grey scudding clouds to the north and east while to the south it looks fairly blue, excellent visibility although there is nothing to see, slept very well last night so a tad late this morning and the road is already busy, for a Sunday. No stock cars causing mayhem like there was last week, you take your chances when parking on Main Street. The PO is quieter than usual, can't put this down to the road closures as I generally see the same faces most of the time, but over the past few weeks there has definitely been a decline, I wonder how much longer the PO can run this place at a loss.

The big thing this week is British Telecom, you may remember I ordered my fibre broadband to the house way back in June or July, since then I was given two tall tales and had the order cancelled once, they did come and fit the wires to the wall, surprisingly they were not blocked at all(?), but they didn't come last Wednesday to put the wire to my router, they moved the date to next Tuesday without telling me. This piece of news took me about an hour and a half to obtain after failing to communicate with one of the world's largest communications companies.

A few days earlier Paul, Malcolm or Rupert phoned me from the sub-continent again as he has taken my rebuffing of his cheap electricity offer personally and has decided to annoy me every week until I come to my senses, his singing a song down the phone was the last straw. The telephone preference service which is supposed to stop unwanted calls but doesn't obviously was no use, I have had cause to complain to Ofcom in the past only to find out they too have no teeth and are paid vast amounts of taxpayers money for simply listening to your complaint then shrugging you off. I decided therefore to get Caller ID, simples yes, no.

I tried calling BT again only to get fed up and decide to do it online, the BT computer told me to go away as I did not have an account with them, I have two and receive bills from them. I then spent forty minutes waiting for a human being to talk to only to be told the line was not commercial but business and she could do nothing for me, I was passed to the business people who told me, go on guess, I was a commercial line and not a business line etc. The woman must have heard the explosion coming and quickly told me to hang on, half an hour later she triumphantly put me through to another woman who told me caller ID would be on my phone in a few hours at the princely sum of £10 a quarter. So forty quid a year to stop being bothered by someone who shouldn't be phoning me in the first place.

No it doesn't end there, it was actually the next day after more phonecalls and more assurances that I had Caller ID, that I really actually got it. And what cheeses me even more and what I cannot get my head around is that since I got it I have only had one call where the number was withheld, in other words no nuisance calls, work that one out.

Where do you stand in the big Mel and Sue kerfuffle, are you going to stick two fingers up to Channel 4 as pirates or wait until the Beeb starts its own cheaper version of Bake Off and brings back the lovable duo. Forget Brexit, the Syrian ceasefire, missing children, police brutality, Black Lives Matter, Bake Off is leaving the BBC for ........... aaaaagh, Channel 4! Get a life, it is a programme about cakes for heaven's sake, fronted by an old dear, a guy who spends too much time in front of the mirror and two women wrongly described as comedians, the last series was so politically correct unless you were brain dead you could have picked the winner in the initial line up.

Mel, or is it Sue, the one who dresses like a guy and has the annoying quiff in her hair, is a draw of course as she ticks the LGBTQI box, unsure of what that is and wondering how many other capitals can be added to what used to be simply LGB, I looked it up. How old fashioned of me, here was I thinking we only came in two flavours, male and female, but no, to this can now be added Questioning and Intersex? Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad. We are doomed.

Anything which is highly personal to oneself shouldn't that be a private matter instead of shouting it from the rooftops and either making yourself a target or cheesing other people off? Like the army jumping on the bandwagon and being 'proud' to have a transgender soldier on the front line and praising his/her 'courage'. That's not the army's job, its job is to give our forces decent weapons, decent kit, decent vehicles, stop recruits being mysteriously shot, not trumpeting the sex or not of one of them.

"Or woman Reg ..................."

I see red ink is in danger of disappearing, at least from marking duties, to mark in red is now seen as 'confrontational' so the more friendly green ink is being brought in as a substitute. I am unsure but I think in the Navy only the captain of a ship was allowed to use green ink, even then the forces were on the cusp of the modern world.

The Beeb have given a doctor a platform for his theory that we can do away with all sorts of prescription drugs, I watched some of the first episode. He showed a very large bowl full of pills and said that this was the amount that a normal child would consume up to the age of ten, I would take issue with that, I know myself I did not take large amounts of pills until I was roughly 55, up until then it was the odd paracetamol and when a child maybe an aspirin or codeine tablet. I have a granddaughter who is seven, or seven and a half she would say, so only a few years away from ten and nope, any medications she has had would hardly fill the bottom of the bowl. I also have a sneaking suspicion his test subjects have been very carefully chosen in order to have them come off their pills. Don't get me wrong, I am not sure at all if simply giving people pills is a good idea, I myself take five different pills a day, one of which I know I could probably control by diet and another which might benefit from a drastic change to rabbit food, so maybe I could get away with three, but I am not willing to take the chance of not taking the other three.

Is your computer cantankerous, does it go to sleep at lunchtime, is it a morning person? Why does my PO computer act so slow in the mornings, surely when you switch the magic juice on being a machine it should be at attention and waiting to go, not have you explain to your first customer of the day, the machine's slow, as he fidgets ready to get back to his car before the local bus takes his wing mirror off or an irate homeowner yells at him to stop blocking the drive.

And why is that sealant stuff sold in such large tubes when all you ever need is six inches of it and despite everything you do to seal the end, in a week or so when you need it again it is solid?

No view next week folks, I am off to the Smoke for a few days.

I almost forgot, silly me, remember what I said about the idiots who brought the airport to a standstill getting off with a slapped wrist? It is better than I thought, nearly all of them are from rich, upper class families, double-barrel names, never had a real job, probably have never rubbed shoulders with someone black from the 'Hood.' They got fined a paltry £95 for causing untold misery to thousands of people as well as showing our police force up once again in a bad light as they stood around helpless dolling out water and sandwiches to the dears instead of carting them away tout suite. No more than a half hour delay if I had been in charge.

Who ordered the vegan ham and pickle substitute..........