Sunday Sunshine in Leicestershire

A few musings from my daily diary today.....

'It's a beautifully sunny Sunday morning and I'm sitting in the back garden, looking over the rolling fields. The sheep are on the far side today and I can see the cattle in the distance.

The bird feeder is doing good business. A flock of sparrows come and go. They do great damage to the two containers with normal seed, spilling the contents onto the floor in a flurry of wings. Having seemingly spilled a lot and eaten little, they contentedly sit as a flock in the nearby rosebush, observing their destructive handiwork.

There's two starlings in attendance too. They don't balance too well as they try and eat the fat cubes. One seems to be the baby of the other and even in this extended summer, it's still calling for attention.

A robin stands contentedly on the floor below the feeders, picking up a King's breakfast from what the sparrows drop.

A blue tit flits in and out from the peanuts, startled by the noise from the starlings. There's a great tit in attendance too.

The swallows are still here, occasionally landing on our roof, and because of the Velux windows, we get a close view of their beauty.

A cock crows in the distance and I pray a prayer of thanksgiving to the God of all creation.'

Ten Years Ago Most Clouds Were Wet

30 years ago, there was no Internet.

20 years ago there were only 130 websites. You couldn’t Google anything.

10 years ago, most clouds were wet.

Today there are over 10 billion mobile devices. 40,000 Google searches every second. 3.5 billion a day. 1.2 trillion a year.

We live in an instant society. Fast food. Fast answers. Instant texts.

But some things stay the same.

The Bible says of God: ‘I am the Lord, and I do not change.’ (Malachi 3:6)

Moving House

We moved house on 10th June.

It took Severn Trent Water a day to change our contract. Scottish Power - a day. Sky TV - two days. Driving licence change - a week.

BT broadband? 91 days and 4 hours.

Incredible incompetence, a lack of customer care and an Openreach operation out of control meant we went around in circles for a long time. All BT seemed able to do was the equivalent to switching an appliance off at the mains, and then back on again, hoping against hope that it works next time around.

I'd like to record here my thanks to all my friends who helped me bombard BT with tweets. Over 200 tweets were sent and I'm sure that was one of the main reasons we got somewhere in the end.

It doesn't seem right that Openreach can dictate what company we use either. We started with Sky, because of the good deal they had. But a month in and a few 'failed connections', Openreach said that they were 'unable to support' another provider. So I had to move to BT. Twice the cost. Half the service.

And that's when the real fun began. It turns out that BT Retail have no say over what BT Openreach do. Or in my case, don't do.

My thanks to Tracey and Robbie from BT Retail for their persistence on my behalf. But in this day and age, to take 91 days without any good reason beyond a 'software problem' is not acceptable.

One of the tweets I sent a number of times referred to BT being 'the worst company in the world'. I stand by that. Don't use them. Unless, like me, you have to.