Wednesday 22 November 2023
Today will be day three of another round of Openreach engineers trying to get our fibre broadband up and running. Progress was made yesterday because we now have the three green lights we needed. However, “our” connection pole is shared with our neighbour and it seems that when ours works, the neighbour’s doesn’t. Hopefully not prematurely, the telecoms engineers who are our broadband resellers are coming today to hopefully fit everything necessary to get us up and running with fibre broadband. I have given up wondering whether to be optimistic or pessimistic.
Yesterday, I was out from just after 10:00 until shortly before 15:00. I drove to Peebles to swap my everyday tyres for my winter tyres. The garage confirmed what I’d suspected about a clunk I’d heard and felt when I had to drive off the side of the road a month or so ago to pass a speeding van. It’s hopefully okay for now but my wheel is a bit buckled. However, I haven’t felt a change and its recent trip to London and back felt fine. I then drove to Peebles via Selkirk for some shopping errands, but mainly to collect some items we’d won from the auction. Amongst our lots was the £8 “anglepoise” lamp (not Anglepoise, sadly) I am currently using and two small chests of drawers. We finally have some drawers for the bedroom. It’s only taken a year to find some low enough to almost get under our extremely low eaves (or would it be high eaves? Steep eaves is maybe most accurate). They are not drawers of beauty but they are at least wood (one slightly older pine than the other), a very good size for the area available to them and they only cost £31 each (£25 before fees). I have now been able to get rid of two of the three chairs I was using for tops.
On my drive home yesterday, I started to get irritated about seeing a car seemingly pull over ahead of me, which I had thought would be someone trying to read Google Maps and hoping for a patch of mobile signal, not having noticed a car behind and the road being narrow at that point. As I slowed down, I realised what the hold-up was: a flock of sheep, two sheep dogs and a shepherd on a quad bike. I’m sure that kind of thing would annoy me if I were in a major hurry but I actually really enjoyed it, stopping for a while and watching the sheepdogs choreograph the flock’s efficient movement.
Part of the reason I was out for so long yesterday was that effectively I had to drive two sides of an equilateral triangle rather than one due to a road closure (which I had known about). There were also at least three sets of temporary traffic lights, two of which allowed quite a lot of traffic through a long area of single-track road (resurfacing on one side). I also had coffee and a cake-lunch in Peebles, which I felt I had very much earned after having driven for about two hours by that point.
I have just tested our Wi-Fi speed under the current set-up of an O2 SIM, remote router up the garden and an internal cable running 50-or-so metres down the garden and into the house. I don’t know what “latency” refers to exactly but it’s 144.1 ms, the download speed is 46.69 Mbps and the upload speed is 19.43 Mbps. In theory it should be significantly faster by the end of today. Hmmmmmmmm.