Friday 1 September 2023
September, the first day of meteorological autumn, yikes, and it is cloudy and looks chilly, though apparently it’s 9°C, which is quite a bit warmer than yesterday in the sun – ah, yes, but yesterday was still summer!
After finishing work yesterday, I drove to one of the nearest letter boxes to post a birthday card and continued walking, with the aim of walking part way up the road to Hawick (“Hoyk”), a road I’ve never walked on. I walked as far out as I wanted to go and had not long turned back when someone in a field shouted out to me something like, “That was a short walk”. I figured maybe he’d thought I was someone else but I waited for him as he put down the tool he was using and walked across a small field to join me at the road. We had never met before but I ended up chatting to him for, I don’t know, maybe half an hour. He took me to the front of their house and called to his wife, who came out to join us. I had a very enjoyable chat to both of them, standing out in the late afternoon sun. That so wouldn’t have happened in London. I enjoyed chatting to them. I waved and carried on my way, passing the house of the two people who had invited Chris and I round for dinner after meeting us at a gig in a village hall. I shouted out to them as I could see them in their garden. So I stopped and had a chat to both of them for about quarter of an hour. I enjoyed chatting to them too. My walk was lovely, very peaceful with few vehicles passing me, I did my 10,000 steps, I posted a card and I chatted to four ‘neighbours’ and took photos of freshly cut fields with good patterns in them.
The other day, as I was walking onto the road from a forestry track, a small BT (or OpenReach, I can’t think which it was) car pulled over, the driver on his way up the track. He asked me if there was a house up there. I told him there was (there are no signs) and that it was about three-and-a-half miles up the tracks. He asked whether the road was ok for his small car. I haven’t been all the way up there but I told him that a local delivery man told me about being up there (it’s all very mysterious and strangely exciting, a house that’s that remote) and that he’d said the road was fine. Off he went. This may not seem interesting, but it is to us. We have had a lot of OpenReach vehicles around recently. We know that the cables are laid ready for fibre broadband and we know that it’s now a matter of connecting it all up and then bringing it into the houses of people who want it. Very exciting. An OpenReach safety engineer called by the other day to ask about possibly cutting a few branches around one of the crucial telegraph poles on our land; he seemed certain we’d be connected this year. Our WiFi is kind of fine, but there’s something a little precarious about a router up the hill with a cable attached to one-metre poles making its way down the garden and into the house. It will at least seem much more secure and faster to have fibre broadband and knowing that BT/OpenReach will be responsible if there are issues, rather than our having to fix issues with our makeshift, though very effective, system. I never thought I’d be so excited about broadband. Similarly, I never thought I’d live in the middle of nowhere. Or that it’d be September before I’d even got over the previous winter!
There are still quite a few swallows around; I saw and heard them sitting on cables along the road yesterday. I know they’re going to be leaving us soon and I’ll miss their loud calls and how they dart around looking constantly busy. Even more, I’m looking forward to their return to mark the end of the worst of winter … in March … well, I think it was more April, but I’m clinging on to March as that’s only – oh, six months. Gulp.
