I’m not sure people realise how bad it gets, the joys of rubbish rural broadband

It all started innocently enough. Suddenly I could not download my emails.

Now you might wonder why I should want to. Simple, rubbish broadband. If I use client like Outlook I can still read my emails when I have no broadband, (like now, when we have a power cut so of course the router doesn’t work.) Not only that but if somebody has sent me a particularly large email, Outlook goes out and collects my emails at ten minute intervals anyway. With our broadband, downloading an email with a lot of attachments is a bit like watching an python swallowing a goat. You can see the bulge inching its way along the wire down to my computer!

Well with Outlook this can happen in its own time, I’m not kicking my heels waiting for it to happen.

Anyway it stopped happening. I couldn’t download my email. Yes they were all there on the website, but they weren’t coming down the pipe to me. So what was going on? I switched my machine off and back on again. Still didn’t work. So I phoned BT. They diagnosed the problem, I was using Outlook 2013. Microsoft no longer supports it. This means the antivirus stuff is no longer up-to-date which means it doesn’t know the current correct funny handshake it needs to talk to my ISP.I would have to upgrade, download the next version.

Did I mention our rubbish broadband? In simple terms, when your broadband runs at 3 Mbps and drops out occasionally you do not try and download new software. When I got a new printer, I had to download printer drivers. The lass on the HP help didn’t believe her eyes when it said it would take 45 minutes to download. In reality it took longer but we were lucky and it did manage it.

So there was no way I could download a new version of Outlook, it would not only take so long, but if it broke off half way through I might not only have to start again, but sometimes you have to disentangle the now damaged half version that you’ve got.

So I had to take it to a shop where they’d download a version for me. While they got it, they’d clean it etc. (Old farm house, no central heating, open coal fire, not a computer friendly environment.)

But it is the same every time I get a computer. In the good old days I’d ask for it to be loaded with Microsoft office and a pdf reader. That did me, and the computer would arrive with everything installed ready to just switch on and go. Now, it comes with the operating system, useless apps I’ll never use, paint and notepad. (So I’m writing this in notepad on a borrowed laptop.)

So the computer had to go back to the shop whilst they found a way of installing office for me. The rule is simple, no office, no sale. (Yes, I know there are cheaper versions, doubtless equally good, and if you can tell me somewhere handy where I can take them in to get them installed, I’m happy to try, but don’t say, “But you can just download them free of the net.”)

People have suggested that I do it on my phone. The issue here is coverage. My phone is on pay as you go, and so far this year (end of June) has cost me about £2. The landline works fine for phone calls, just rubbish for broadband. When I’m out working I rarely want to phone anybody, anyway. And to be honest when I’m working I’m not all that keen on being disturbed by phone calls. Standing in the middle of a field, in the rain, surrounded by dairy heifers, isn’t a good time to talk on the phone. But I thought I’d try my phone using the house Wi-Fi.

Have you ever used a ‘smart phone’ working with 3 Mbps Wi-Fi? Continents drift gaily past you. Still I persevered. My daughter has given me a couple of those rubber ended pen things you can use to press the screen so I have a sporting chance of getting the letter I want. Armed with that and wearing my reading glasses I set to work. I decided to go to facebook first because a lot of people contact me via messenger. I remembered my password, logged (slowly, oh so slowly) onto facebook only for them to tell me that as I was logging in from a new device, they’d send me a pin to enter. They did, by text to my phone. The same phone that I was using at the time.

By the time I’d got out of the browser, opened the text, noted down the number, and opened the browser (all at 3 Mbps) the facebook page had gone and I had to start again. Which of course meant that the number they sent me was no longer current and I had to ask for a new number. At that point I abandoned the process.

I mentioned that I was on a borrowed laptop. During the day there was a Test Match. My lady wife has the BBC scrolling commentary on as she’s working. When I was using this laptop, our Wi-Fi, with two of us using it, dropped to 0.38 Mbps. At that speed, she could no longer watch the little video clips the BBC include, as they just never stopped buffering.

And now there is a risk that the Inland Revenue want us to submit tax online. Now we have no accounting software. I know, you can get accounting software, “Just download it from the Web,” but she prefers to work on paper and I also hate scrolling endlessly across spreadsheets.

But obviously we’d have to somehow acquire the software, at a cost, and pay for the inevitable updates. I’m looking to start a denomination that finds dealing with government electronically heretical and offensive, and we’ll revert to paying them in cash.

Oh yes, and just to put a tin hat on it all, I left my desktop machine at the shop. They cleaned it and then phoned me to come in to do passwords and stuff as software was upgraded. So they hooked my machine up to their Wi-Fi (I bet that made it dizzy!) and I opened Outlook to start the process.

When you open Outlook the first thing it does is to go can collect my emails. It did, right there in the shop and it downloaded them. I looked at the chap in the shop and he just shrugged. “Nothing wrong with Outlook, it’s just that your broadband is so rubbish there are times when it cannot even download your emails.”
Back in the day we used to get dialup. It was cheaper, slower, but could at least download email.

♥♥♥♥

There again, what do I know, talk to the expert !

As a reviewer commented, “

This is a delightful collection of gentle rants and witty reminiscences about life in a quiet corner of South Cumbria. Lots of sheep, cattle and collie dogs, but also wisdom, poetic insight, and humour. It was James Herriot who told us that ‘It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet’ but Jim Webster beautifully demonstrates that it usually happened to the farmer too, but far less money changed hands.

I, for one, am hoping that this short collection of blogs finds a wide and generous audience – not least because I’m sure there’s more where this came from. And at 99p you can’t go wrong!”

Never let a good crisis go to waste

Harvesting chickpeas in Myanmar

Apparently it was Machiavelli who said (almost certainly in Italian) “Never waste the opportunity offered by a good crisis.” Churchill followed him by saying “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Obviously their advice is being followed.

I just read that the government will unveil a new food strategy ‘and tell farmers to produce more fruit and vegetables in the wake of record inflation.’

Not only that but government is going to call for changes to make it easier to turn land into farms, make poultry workers eligible for seasonal migrant jobs and propose that schools, prisons and hospitals offer vegan options.

Some people haven’t got a clue. If UK farmers could make money out of producing fruit and vegetables, they’d already be producing fruit and vegetables. But now, in the wake of record inflation, they’re not only expected to produce them, but produce them cheaply to keep prices down. Answers on a postcard please, why is this not going to happen?

But given that only weeks ago the policy was to turn farmland into forestry, perhaps the ‘oil tanker’ of government policy, which has regarded farming as expendable since the 1980s, is at last turning round?
But I do love the way the whole vegan experience has leapt onto the bandwagon.
I went on the BBC website for some vegan recipes for people in schools, prisons and hospitals.
Falafel burgers; – basic ingredients chickpeas, not grown in this country but most come from India, Australia, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Turkey. Strikes me as some of these countries would be better off eating their own produce rather than producing cash crops to export of the wealthy west.

Vegan chili; – containing sweet potatoes, (somebody did manage to produce a crop commercially in the UK, but effectively they’re all imported from the US, Egypt, Vietnam and Spain) a can of black beans (There are trials going on to see if there are varieties that can be grown in the UK but they’re largely exported by India, Myanmar, Brazil and the USA) and a can of red kidney beans. (Again the main exporters are Thailand, Brazil, South Africa, Ukraine, and Papua New Guinea. These beans probably like a warmer climate than we can manage.)

Finally (because I’m just doing the first three) Spiced aubergine bake.

Of course the aubergines are largely imported as commercial production in the UK is under plastic and may involve some heat, (so don’t look for an expansion of UK production any time soon) whilst I suspect that you will search for a long time to find the UK coconut plantations to provide you with the coconut milk.

So we have a war, a food and an energy crisis, and a vocal minority have convinced government this can be tackled by importing expensive food from abroad.

But to be fair they’re not the only ones taking advantage of a good crisis. I know somebody who had to take a family member to hospital. Of course they were not allowed in A&E with them. So an elderly, injured and vulnerable person was separated from anybody they knew. The person they most wanted with them was left outside in the carpark. At night. In the dark. But this lady left on her own in the carpark couldn’t just go home, she had to wait there so the hospital could tell her to come and take the elderly person home. Perhaps. In their own sweet time.

And at 3am, after six or seven hours, alone in her car on a dark carpark, she could finally take the person home.
Why?
Come on, why?
What on earth is the epidemiological reasoning behind this? I could see it if hospital staff led closeted lives, not mixing with anybody and keeping themselves in a bubble. But I know hospital staff. They go home to their families, they kiss their children good night even through the children mix with everybody else at school. For all I know they might even condescend to kiss their partners. They go into shops (unmasked and with no PPE) and they are even seen in public houses and other places of entertainment. So if doing these things is so dangerous, why on earth are they allowed into hospital? They’ve every bit as potentially infectious as the rest of us.
The sneaking suspicion is that it’s no longer epidemiological, it’s just we’re a damned nuisance and if they can discourage us from going in, it makes life easier for them. Especially if there’s nobody with sharp elbows asking why they haven’t done their job properly.

And we’ve seen other people using the crisis. I think that government has had a lot less trouble pushing forward nuclear than it would have had. In this case events have concentrated minds. Similarly others have grasped the opportunity to push forward with electric cars, which are starting to look more economic.

But I confess I do wonder. Electric cars will not work for a lot of people who currently run a car. They are fine if you have a nice house with a drive and even a garage. You can back your car into the garage overnight and charge it at the cheapest times in perfect security. If you live in a flat are you going to have to dangle your expensive and anonymous copper cable out of the window and across the carpark to your car?

Or perhaps that brief window of human existence when perfectly ordinary people had the opportunity to just go anywhere they wanted, at a whim, without worrying about timetables and suchlike, is drawing to a close?

And a final thought, people are trapped between high energy prices, high food prices and high housing costs. In all candour, government can do very little about food costs. They could cut fuel duty, but again, most of our energy is imported to they can do very little about energy costs. But housing costs is something they might be able to tackle. After all, we don’t ‘import it’.
There’s already talk about increasing taxes on second homes. I suspect that will go down well enough with voters.

But what about capping rents. Limiting them to a maximum of £x per square meter (or yard or whatever) so that, for example, a three bedroomed house was no more than £650 a month. Combined with regular inspections to make sure they were fit for habitation. Yes there would be howls from buy to let landlords but the answer to them need only be, “Well you can always sell up.” I suspect the releasing of housing onto the market would bring prices down with a bang. Electorally this could play well for the government that brought it in. Far too much money in this country goes into housing as it is. It’s warping the economy. Perhaps we shouldn’t let a good crisis go to waste?

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There again, what do I know. Ask an expert.

 

As a reviewer commented, “This book charts a year in the life of a Cumbrian sheep farmer. It’s sprinkled with anecdotes and memories of other years. Some parts (especially when featuring Sal, the Border Collie) were so funny as to cause me to have to read them out loud to my husband. It’s very interesting to read these things from the pen of the man who is actually out there doing it – usually in the rain! A very good read.“