I live in a very rural spot of South East
Scotland, as I have mentioned here previously. We are not isolated in the sense
that Canadians or Australians would recognise the term, but we are some miles from
the nearest village (pubs, shops, post office) and we have so few neighbours
that our immediate area is always well down any priority lists for infrastructure
improvement. The nearest piped gas supply stops about 4 miles away, our
broadband speed is so slow that it even surprises the local engineers, our
electricity arrives via overhead cables, which run some miles across the farm
fields and through gaps cut in the woods, and there is no mobile phone service
here. By the standards of mainland Britain, this is a backwater.
The location suits us, and there are
obviously a number of considerable advantages in living out here, but it is the
last two of these small technical matters that this morning’s Blethering Sunday
hooptedoodle will focus upon.
Rural charm |
Subject 1 – Up the Pole
The oldest part of our house was originally
a dairyman’s cottage, and was built around 1960. The area which is now our side
garden (which, confusingly, is where the front door is) was originally the
“drying green” for the little hamlet of farm cottages. We have a hefty wooden
pole in the middle of the side lawn, which brings the electric power to the
house. The garden has had new boundaries and been landscaped over the years,
but I see no reason to suppose that the pole has ever been replaced since 1960.
It is part of the character of the place,
and in Provence or somewhere it would seem quite charming to have overhead
power cables, but our pole is not a source of pleasure in that way. Since a
large neighbouring tree was removed a few years ago, the pole now dominates the
garden, and it is not without some dangers. Kites are a very bad idea, water
sprayers and hosepipes have to be kept out of the hands of children (in case
they fry themselves), and there are numerous local stories of tree surgeons and
roofers being killed by discharges arcing from these old cables. We cannot use
a pressure spray to take moss off the roof, for example, for fear that the
spray makes the God of the Pole angry, and he literally strikes us down. Thus
all roof cleaning and repair has to be done with a lot of hand scraping and
rather hushed conversation – to be on the safe side.
The ancient pole itself is rotting – on a
summer afternoon, if there is no wind, you can hear the wasps munching away at
it, deep in the cracks. Our chums at Scottish Power have occasionally come and
looked at it, and promised that it will be replaced, but mostly their visits have
been notable for fresh applications of very unsightly barbed wire – on the pole
and on its anchor-stay – to frustrate our obvious enthusiasm to shin up the 20
feet or so and place a wet finger on the wires, to see what happens. Each time
they go away, I take the law into my own hands and remove the barbed wire – if
I wish to electrocute myself, I have no desire to hurt myself on the wire on the
way up, and I certainly don't want to look at the stuff on a regular basis.
When the pole was last inspected in 2012,
the young fellow from Scottish Power said it would be replaced very soon. I
asked him was there any chance of the new pole being re-sited in the lane
outside our garden, which would give a straighter run for the cabling, would
move the wires to a new location, away from our front steps (so the pigeons
could no longer sit in a row and defecate on visitors), and would improve the safety of
the place quite a bit and the appearance very considerably. The SP man peered
at me from beneath his yellow hardhat with the sort of nervous look which is
correctly used when dealing with dangerous lunatics (I believe it is part of
their training), and mumbled something about regulations and cable spans and
planning permission – then he left.
They have returned. A much older man
arrived last month, announced that the replacement of the pole was imminent,
and – with hardly any prompting from us – suggested that it would be much
better to place the new pole outside in the lane (exactly where we wanted it)
and, provided the farmer didn’t object, they would be back to carry out the
work in April.
Well, the days are accomplished. The pole
has been installed. The cables have not been attached yet, but we are booked
for a day without electricity on Wednesday, when the cables will be replaced
with modern ones. This is such an unexpected stroke of good fortune that we are
still expecting something to go wrong, but the pole is here, and it’s standing
up, and I can’t see SP wasting their time and money to change it again. All
being well, our hated pole will be gone by next weekend. The only people who
will not be pleased are the family of sparrows who are living in an illegal
nesting box (above the barbed wire line) on the pole itself, but there must
always be a little collateral damage.
Good – we’ll give this a very large tick.
The sparrows will have more babies in future years.
All right - no laughter, please... |
Subject 2 – The Dreaded Smart-Phone
I have a very ancient mobile phone – it is
so old, in fact, that the sales assistant in Phones4U burst out laughing when
he saw it yesterday. I was not embarrassed – I was quite proud of it. I should
have done something about my mobile years ago, but I hardly use it, and I am
currently paying my network supplier some £18 a month for something which gives
me hardly any benefit at all. How stupid is that?
As mentioned earlier, my home is a dead
spot on the mobile networks – no service at all. When I was running my little
publishing business, and travelling around a bit, I used my mobile a lot, and
could not have managed without it. Without that context, my phone is now an
expensive nuisance for most of the time. It is useful when I go away, or out in
the car, but I only really need to make the occasional call and send the odd
text – I have been known to take photos, but rarely.
The rest of the world, of course, cannot
understand this. Despite my requests that they should not use my mobile number,
friends and businesses constantly make calls which I do not receive. Courier
deliveries and internet banking security procedures now do not work properly if
you do not have a working mobile. Service engineers for utilities and domestic
hardware will request a mobile number, so they can text and tell us when they
are likely to arrive. If you do not have a working mobile, pal, you are not a
citizen.
There is a whiff of comedy when I drive
away from home, up the lane and off the farm. There is a sound like a genteel
fire alarm, which is the accumulated urgent text messages from the last couple
of days chiming through as I head towards the real world. By the time I get to
the public road – maybe a mile away – the display shows a handsome network
service, ready to meet all my demands. The thing which really niggles is that I
am paying £18 per month for this joke, and it is all my own fault, since I
have not done anything about it before now.
The network provider keeps urging me to
upgrade my phone, which hardly seems worthwhile if I don’t use it. Thus my wife
and all the sensible people have moved on, and bought modern phones, while I
still live in a bygone age. A friend of mine visited recently, and – of course
– his mobile didn’t work, but he has an app installed on his iPhone which
enables him to register with my house wi-fi, and he could then receive and make
calls through the internet quite satisfactorily.
Aha.
The rest of the world almost certainly is
aware of all this and uses it every day, but it had eluded me until now.
Yesterday I travelled to Edinburgh (on the train, with a loaf of bread and my
old phone in a knotted handkerchief, on a stick over my shoulder) and went to
talk to the nice people in the phone shops. Goodness, what a lot of them there
are…
I had to get someone to talk me out of this
loop – don’t want a smartphone since no service at home and not worth the
expense, but only way to get a decent service at home is with a smartphone. I
think I now have a way ahead. I can change my contract so that the monthly allowances are so much better I can hardly believe it, and they will provide me with a posh
new phone so that I can use them, and the monthly payment will go down to
three-quarters of what it is now. If I provide my own phone it will be even cheaper
– about half. It all hinges on whether the mobile actually works at my house
under this new arrangement. The sales guy at EE (I am an Orange customer)
reckons it will, but then he has the faith, which I do not.
They have offered to lend me a SIM card for
a fortnight so I can try it out. Seems sensible.
So I am approaching a big decision point –
if it works, I will join the ranks of the detestable smartphone users, and my
life will change forever (aaargh!); if it doesn’t, I shall probably hang on to
my existing museum-exhibit and switch to a cheap, pay-as-you-go arrangement
which suits my minimal usage.
I had a trial play with my wife’s iPhone
yesterday – it seems very good – I quite fancy that. The only hang-ups I have
are
(1) the cost of the phone
(2) the fact that it offers a vast array of
features, games, music, ridiculous apps and so on that I am not the slightest
bit interested in
(3) I have to rise above my virulent
dislike of smartphones, and the very serious damage they have done to education, literacy, the workings of society and a number of other trifling areas
Yesterday I sat on the train into Edinburgh
and it was almost silent. Nobody speaks, so as you would notice. Everyone is
texting, so presumably they must have some friends somewhere else – unless, of
course they were texting the person in the next seat. The other day, I sat in a
coffee bar in a bookshop in Haddington, reading, when three ladies arrived at
the next table – greeted each other warmly, ordered coffee and cakes, and then got out
their iPhones and ignored each other for the next 20 minutes. Terrific – I
don’t want to get like that – even a bit. The fact that I have no mates might
help out a lot here.
How can we have such an overkill of
communications technology, when hardly anyone has anything worthwhile to say? How
can we have such an overprovision of phone apps which we do not really need and
which waste more time than anyone can sensibly afford? How can anyone ever get any peace, or have a worthwhile idea, if they spend their lives with their heads jammed up their backsides?
Don’t tell me how busy
you are if you spend a quarter of your day gawping at crap online, or sending
non-messages to your pals. If you choose to do it, then no problem, but it is a
choice – you are not really busy. Get a life. And do not answer your phone or check
your texts while you are speaking to me, or I shall throw the thing into the
nearest pond.
LOL