2025 Quick Daily Posts

[richardandtracy]

Thank you Mabel. Much appreciated.

Regards,

Richard.

[Serinde]

Couldn't have said it better than Mabel. Squeaky was such a character and his own self right to the end. So sorry.

[richardandtracy]

He was a character right to the end. We will miss him so much.

Regards,

Richard

[richardandtracy]

We have a distraction of a sort..

CitiFibre is digging up the road outside our house to put in 'SuperFast' broadband. May be useful, may be not. There seems to need to be a different cable to each house. At the moment we get 50MBps which isn't bad, certainly an improvement on our 33k dial-up of 10 years ago and then 2.5Mbps during the 2020 Covid lockdown.
I wonder if we'll be forced to abandon the analogue phone. If so, we won't have phone contact with the rest of the world in a power cut. Mobile phones simply don't work in the house, and once we go to digital phones, they won't work in a power cut because the power supply to the router goes. So, after a century of continuous service obligation, going to digital telephones means the service fails at the first power cut. Is there anything to learn from Spain & Portugal this week?

Our remaining cat Ozzie is normally spooked by everything happening on the road outside the house, but he was unphased by the cacophony from the road being cut, dug & re-laid. Strange what bothers cats.

Regards

Richard

[Mabel Figworthy]

The digital-phones-in-a-power-cut problem has worried me terribly right from the start. Never mind Spain and Portugal, last year several areas up north (i.e. Not In London) were without power for several days - back-up batteries simply will not cut it in those cases. (And don't get me started on the "we will provide extra battery back-up for vulnerable people"; as if non-vulnerable people [and what are those?] couldn't possibly suffer a heart attack or a serious fall or any other thing that might necessitate calling 999.)

[Serinde]

That was certainly our position during Storm Eowyn. We had various ways to keep the phones charged (a power block and our car battery in a pinch). We set the phones against the front window to catch any passing signal (DH and I are on two separate networks for a reason!), but if the local mast is out of action, nothing will help if the analogue phone isn't available. Check with BT about how it plans to roll out the digital phone switchover in your area. In some instances, BT will allow customers to keep their landline for a longer period of time. Obviously, other suppliers may vary.

During the storm we also discovered what it meant to have no other source of energy apart from electricity, our gas hob having been replaced with an induction hob. Luckily, our wood burner, which sits slightly proud of the fireplace (by design!) allowed us to heat water, soup, etc on it. Exactly what I hoped when I argued for it to be put in this way. We had one toasty room and a way to make supper. We only lost power for 7 or so hours, unlike some poor souls, but we could have made it work for a few days. Washing would have been interesting... but those of us who remember the '70s in the UK, also remember unheated bathrooms. Back to the Future!