Soon after 8 a.m. on October 9 our first truly human contact with BT since it privatised arrived at our door in the form of network engineer Michael (of BT's contracted-out partners OpenReach). When he arrived we had no internet. When he left we had 40 meg of broadband. St Michael, the BT sparks leaves his marks...
It started with BT's frankly misleading statement that it is rolling out broadband to the rural community. Well sort of, chaps. Down here in Lyng we were a famous not-spot. Some three years ago, fed up with no broadband a team got together and succeeded in getting a local firm to install a mast, suitable kit and connect some 200 local houses to a decently fast wi-fi system.
It developed some issues and was rescued by Thinking Wisp, a Norfolk rural wi-fi supplier. But along the way BT ran fibre down Sparham Hill to a new green Infinity Cabinet alongside the existing telephone box. Our exchange at Reepham, already technically unbundled (freed for competitive service providers), was now fibre-connected to the cabinet (FTTC).
For eight years I have had my broadband over BT's existing copper service. Given the distance to Reepham I was fairly impressed of late to get 1.3 megs – only a few years earlier 56k was the best so 24 times faster. And I had been told more than once that when the fibre in Lyng was activated I would get up to the 8 meg contract I was paying for. Wrong.
To get a faster service even as an existing customer you have to buy the new Infinity product. And, as a customer, you don't get the fancy 'come-on' offers either. So BT is NOT extending broadband into the rural areas – it is extending Infinity, its own product and charging more for it. Infinity is so designed that even other, competitive providers like Sky have to send you a modem/router (the connecting device) that is specially configured to be able to run data over BT's system!
And wait for this – your telephone stays on the old copper wire into the old box and goes to the exchange by the old route. Only the copper wires involved in broadband are connected to the Infinity cabinet. Which is why the cock-up that happened to us, and others, is easier to achieve than it first looked.
Activation day for our fairly expensive new Infinity service was October 4 and the connecting device, a Home Hub 5, arrived a day or two earlier as promised. And as promised during October 4 morning our broadband went off. Instructions said: Connect the hub and about half an hour after the old service goes off the new Infinity will start. No it won't.
Our Home Hub flashed all the colours it is intended to except one – the flashing amber B for Broadband remained resolutely NOT steady BLUE!
Now comes the unfunny bit. We call the helpline. It's a robot voice inviting all sorts of spoken instructions. Only one works - “You want to talk about Infinity?” YES! And then what do you want to talk about? WON'T CONNECT! A connection problem? YES!!!! Press option 2! We do. We wait. 30 minutes then a voice. We explain. They test. It isn't working. We know that. We'll get back to you.
They do. Still amber flashing lights. The phone line cuts! First time in eight years! They call back. We go through the entire install routine with them. We re-boot the hub. We turn it off, count to 120 and turn it on again. Still amber. Still flashing. Phone line cuts again.
They call back. We think its the cabinet down the road. They say they will test and get back to us. Hours pass. We call again. Same robot voice. Same daft questions. Same outcome although the wait is 45 minutes this time. Still October 4 but only just. We demand escalation. Agreed – someone will telephone October 5 between 10-11.
No one does. We call a new number – same robot voice, same results but this time its quicker as it is Saturday and most people have better stuff to do. Long conversations with more very polite, very capable and very distant Indian gentlemen. Seems the new number found the same call centre too.
Finally they agree we need an engineer visit. October 9 between 8 and 1. Hooray, although it seems a long way from October 4 and of course no broadband. The phone drops out twice and again on a private call later. And we do get a nearby 'share' connection called FON with a BT subscriber but it is woefully slow.
And so to the engineer's visit today (Oct 9). Michael is a very nice chap. Very patient with customers and, it later transpires equally patient with his colleagues. Which is frankly to his credit.
He tests our kit which, as we had told him (the writer has some small skill in this area) was working fine. We mention others in the village are not happy and drop out seems to be common. Aha, he says. He goes off to the cabinet (we can see it from our kitchen window, about 50 metres way). He is gone a long time. In fact his van disappears for a while and I do wonder... But it is Michael; no sweat.
He comes back even more cheerful. Rightly so – our hub goes blue! And stays blue which it has done for up to 30 seconds before (don't ask – its a BT thing). We test – we get 34 meg down and 8 up! Eureka! Well Infinity actually although given events we know why the name Eternity was not adopted.
So now we have a connection that, when I was at Pipex in 1995 would have set me back a cool £120,000 per annum plus £8,000 per kilometre installation. Phew! It is 700 times faster than the 56k modem we were so proud of in 1999! It means a SPAM email of 1k will now arrive even faster than its journey into the trash bin. It used to take an amazingly lifelike time to see the whole word Viagra expand onto the screen.
But even better I know what went wrong and I can enjoy this for years. Almost worth the wait.
See as I mentioned earlier the telephone line stays connected to the old telephone box. So on Infinity day, BT's OpenReach contractors open the boxes and connect the appointed customer wires from the phone box to the Infinity box. And on the day there were three to do.

• My neighbour was connected to my wires. 
  


• Someone else, not due to be connected was connected to his. 
  


• And mine were connected to the not Infinity person. 
  


• So none of us got Infinity when only one of us didn't want it. Still with me?
  

Now my other beef is this: 
If the only way a rural customer can get broadband from BT is by ordering and paying for the Infinity product isn't that a bit of a swizz?

You see BT got £280 million of our money from the Government to extend broadband to the rural areas. But they are doing it buy collaring more money from every customer and a £30 connection fee.

Rip off Britain? Or is it just business in the 21st century? I leave it up to you.

I'M too arrogant (probably) to share my blog with others very often but this letter appeared in our regional paper, the once great EDP. And it so accurately encapsulated many of my views I felt compelled to share it. If the EDP letter page was easy to link to, or even available on line, I would have gone for a simple link. Instead I have OCR'd it and here it is - all power to Mr Kiuby's letter writing arm! LATE addition is a reply from the NFU published in the EDP and thus copied by me in the spirit of fairness. You decide then? It son the end of this.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2013 Eastern Daily Press

From,: ALAN KIRBY, Haven Court, Hayle. 

We hear much condemnation of "scroungers" these days, which is usually aimed at unemployment benefit claimants. I won't defend those who choose this as a "lifestyle" - but they are a very small proportion of the workless, and the amount of public money they manage to rip-off is tiny compared with the tax avoidance schemes of rich individuals and corporations.
But one group, mostly already wealthy, who shovel up vast amounts of public subsidy are generally ignored and need to be exposed - our large landowners and farmers.

Represented by powerful lobby groups like the NFU and the Country Land and Business Association, both with highly privileged access to this government, they not only vigorously defend the status quo on subsidies and 
the like, but also continuously demand more exemptions and "money for nothing".

The NFU has in recent months:
1) Successfully lobbied for the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board, robbing labourers of most of what little protection on wages 
and conditions they had.
2) Fought off an attempt by the EU to impose a cap on the subsidy any one farmer can receive. Direct payments alone are currently 
nearly £200 per hectare.
3) Resisted an attempt by the EU to devote a mere 2pc of payments to new entrant young farmers.
4) Gained an exemption on road safety rules for tractors and trailers. 

Ensuring that the new Common Agricultural Policy is even less green than the old, they have:
1) Obtained automatic entitlement to payments for protecting the environment, whether they're doing it or not.
2) Reduced the proposed "ecological focus" areas from I0pc to 5pc, and so weakened the rules governing them that they can effectively be intensively farmed.
3) Reduced the funding for environmental schemes.
4) Ensured that they do not need to comply with the Birds, Water or Pesticides Directive to continue receiving public hand-outs.
5) Arranged for farmers on highly marginal land, such as mountains, to get payments for grazing these areas, despite it often being ecologically damaging.

Indeed, blood-sports are also subsidised. Grouse-moor estates are entitled to payments for "preserving" their bio-diversity poor heather moorlands - even though they would do this anyway. Yet still they whinge and try to grasp ever larger quantities of taxpayers' money and ever greater exemptions, while the poor and needy have their benefits cut and have to resort to food bnks and the real wages of most workers fall ever further.
Whenever the praclices, of livestock farmers cause some disaster - such as BSE or Foot-and Month, they seek to blame someone else and demand vast compensation, in those cases running to billions, from public funds. The current scapegoat for their own failings is, of course, the poor, blood-stained badger. 
I fervently hope the next government will seriously target the real  scroungers who so damage our public finances but this will never be done by the Conservatives, because the serious scroungers are their own donors, and most influential members.


NEVER SAID IT BETTER MYSELF!


NEW! - REPLY FROM NFU: Environmental performance has improved

ALEX DINSDALE, Norfolk County Adviser, National Farmers Union,

Re "Time to tackle this drain on resources" (Letter, October 10), space doesn't permit a full analysis of all of the inaccuracies described in this letter, but one or two corrections do deserve to be made. Mr Kirby says the NFU has "reduced the funding for environmental schemes", failing to recognise that we don't have such powers. In fact, both the environment and farmers have benefited from environmental schemes, with 78pc of Norfolk farmland managed under such a scheme.

The environmental performance of farming has improved dramatically in recent decades, and while not without their flaws, the popularity of environmental stewardship schemes is testament to this.

The assertion that the NFU has "ensured that [farmers] do not need to comply with the Birds, Water or Pesticides Directive (sic) to continue receiving public hand-outs" is simply wrong. Farmers are bound by these laws as everyone else is, and they are rigorously enforced.

National Farmers' Union (NFU) members do not want to have to rely on Common Agricultural Policy payments; as with any business the objective is to operate competitively without this support and these views have been expressed many times by NFU President Peter Kendall.

The reality is, however, that farmers operate in a global market; ending subsidies for English farmers would severely handicap our sector by increasing farmgate prices and thus exposing us to competition from much cheaper imports from countries where state agricultural support continues to be provided, including the rest of the EU and the US. This would have disastrous consequences for farm businesses, the rural economy, landscapes and countryside as well as our food security.

The real crux of Mr Kirby's letter, however, is his opposition to the policy of culling badgers in order to reduce the devastation caused by bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in cattle herds. Norfolk's growing badger population seems to be uninfected by bTB and so the focus here is on avoiding cattle-to-cattle spread of the disease.

Where bTB is prevalent in wildlife populations its spread to cattle causes misery to farmers and the loss of their livelihoods through the destruction of their herds. Vaccination will be an important tool to help control bTB in the future but a realistic and effective programme is not yet a viable option. In the meantime, killing thousands of infected cattle while ignoring the disease reservoir in wildlife will not control the disease, its costs or the misery it causes”.

MY RESPONSE TO THE LAST PARA: Illogical to suggest a growing badger population and NO TB in cattle IF he (the NFU) believes that badgers cause TB in cattle. Maybe we just haven't had any TB infected cattle in contact with unaffected badgers yet? Assuming that is in fact the actual vector of transmission. RW

 

YOU may recall that one of this week's little controversies regarded a thoughtless Tweet sent out by a very senior manager at Tesco. (BBC report here)
The nub of this was that he gloated - IN A TWEET!- over his team's success in closing some distribution depots, replacing them with new ones, offering such poor wages that existing staff had little choice but to jump ship. A cheap way of cutting staff, although one does wonder whether it is not constructive dismissal. 
In the process Tesco, hardly famous for high wages, has cut distribution depot workers' wages by as much as £8,000 and drivers by up to £15,000. 
Anyway, in the spiirit of harming Tesco... nah, I mean sharing don't I... here is the exchange so far between me and the big T

FIRST I WROTE to several people including Philip Clarke and the offending manager. Mr Clarke got a factotum toi reply (so would I actually) buit he managed to use my mail to Strachota and not the one to Clarke:
: 
From: Richard Woods 
[mailto:richard.a.p.woods@btinternet.com] 
Sent: 03 July 2013 
19:49
To: scstrachota@hotmail.com
Cc: Tesco Email Service 
Team; Relations, Investor; Office, Press; enquiries, cr; Clarke, 
Philip
Subject: Awesome lack of intellignce? 
Or...

...the true face of caring Tesco revealed by a hireling? Astonished 
to find you on Linked-IN Mr Strachota - most of the people there are 
professional managers. I guess you are pretty pleased with yourself. 800 jobs 
lost, depots closed, salaries cut by £8-15k - must be your red-letter day. 
Wouldn't it be great to find your family members among the people you have 
mis-treated. Now, the Tweet has been deleted - your turn next we hope. 


Richard and Janet Woods, now completely ex-spenders of about £8-9k a 
year with Tesco. (We had already reduced it as far as possible; now it will be 
zero and my wife's phone will change network ASAP.

Richard and Janet Woods

TESCO REPLY:

On 05/07/2013 12:40, ceo.customerservice@tesco.co.uk wrote:
Dear Mr & Mrs Woods

Thank you for your email to Philip Clarke, our Chief Executive, to which I have been asked to respond. 

This tweet was intended to acknowledge that difficult decisions had been taken in order to make significant changes to our distribution network.  Steve has spoken to our colleagues at Harlow in person to explain this and they recognised that it should be seen in that context. Nonetheless, we sincerely apologise if the tweet caused any offence, and it has now been removed.
Thank you once again for contacting our Chief Executive's office. I hope that, despite your experience, you will give us the chance to restore your faith in our operations, by coming back and shopping with us again.

Kind regards

David Weaver
Customer Service Executive


FINALLY, my response: 

Dear Mr Weaver

Thank you for your reply on behalf of the CEO who is of course too busy for such matters. I would ask you to consider however whether a Tweet is, was or ever could be the right place for such communications? Does it not indicate the depth of contempt in which staff are held by this man? My point in complaining and why I hoped it would reach the CEO is that your employee appears to be exposing the real policy of Tesco. In short to maximise profits regardless, minimise and even avoid tax payments to the point of immorality, reduce wages to subsistence levels and cut staff wherever and whenever possible.

I have been in business and management long enough to know with virtually absolute certainty that this is a doomed policy. Since it is a competitive environment all the others will do the same. In time you will all have employees/customers who earn too little to shop in your environment. You will be unable to recruit staff for the pittance you are prepared to pay and your costs will start to rise as Government wake up to the price of their compliance and begin to crack down on you.

The words goose, golden and shoot spring to mind. All I can say is that I shall do all in my power to dissuade people from using your shops or myriad other services, to avoid investing in your activities and, if already investor to dump you  (I shall for example check with my pension payers and urge them to re-consider). They need to do this before the public dumps you. Which may be sooner than you or Mr Strachota think.

My regards to you and my hope that you too get out soon,

These worms ARE for turning,

Richard Woods (a former customer spending about £10,00 per annum with Tesco).

There is little more distressing than the sight of someone trying to pass the buck, which made and article in this week's Eastern Daily Press especially hard to take. 
Rachel Moore is a regular writer in the EDP and often her pieces about the life and times of a busy mum are on the ball . But this one was self-serving and hypocritcal. Her point was that she and other mum's didn't have the MMR jab after the 1998 scare because they didn't get good enough advice. Oh pl-eese Rachel. How much more did you need?
There was, Rachel, absolutely no lack of good advice about the importance of the MMR vaccination and the unlikely chance of any link with autism. Right from the start. What you and other mothers did was inexplicably ignore the conventional medical advice in favour of the unconventional shock story. Indeed a major outbreak of measles such as in Swansea was actually forecast at the time IF parents like Rachel withheld their children from vaccination.
Rachel also suggested in her article that she and other mothers viewed measles as a "mild itchy rash" - this is also utterly bizarre. All parents from my own to my daughters knew what it really was - dangerous. But from the moment the Daily Mail and others decided some dodgy research that had not been peer reviewed should suddenly stop all parents from protecting their children from this triumvirate of dreadful disease every sane medical authority from GPs to the national Medical Officer of Health was trumpeting the facts - "its tosh, if you don't vaccinate you risk you children's lives, sight and health and a major outbreak or epidemic." Of course they were cautious but what they said was - have the jab!
For anyone to try to suggest it was otherwise to an extent that she and other parents are somehow exonerated from their own culpability is hypocrisy of the worst sort. Indeed she goes on to acknowledge that in time she relented and her sons were vaccinated. Good advice heeded perhaps?
It is worth remembering that this 'scare' was also one of the first to be given the acceleration provided by the internet. If you Google MMR Scare 1998 you get 1.6 million results. And if you confine that search to 1998 you find that within days of the scare there were major news articles urging parents not to panic and to get their kids vaccinated.
Now Wales and especially south Wales has always been an exception when it comes to vaccinations and immunisations. I worked there in the mid 70s and even then medics were often getting the media to urge parents to vaccinate. Don't ask me why but even without the 1998 MMR scare Swansea had a problem. It needs 75% of a population to protect themselves/children for the disease to go into decline and they only just reached it back then.
So I wrote to Rachel Moore via the editor to plead with her to do all today's mothers a favour and put up her hands: she was wrong, she came to realise it and now regrets reacting unnecessarily to a scare story. 
And I urged to do it soon because like all hacks she influences people and who knows how long before the next daffy doctor does it again.

Correspondents in newspapers (the |Guardian for one) recently have taken the opportunity (of Christmas perhaps?)  to suggest that atheists do not "believe" anything, that atheism is not a "belief system" and that atheists do not belong to a "belief group". What a lot of self-serving tosh.
I am an atheist and have been for all of my adult life. I BELIEVE there is no God, or even god. I BELIEVE indeed that there is no room or need for such a creature or being or whatever. I share this belief with many people and we are thus a BELIEF GROUP.
More than that I also BELIEVE in science and the scientific way. It is my faith that science and the inquiring minds of humankind can provide already the answer for most things - where we are, what we are, how we are, how we started, how we came to be what we are. Science is even beginning to explain why we are (which I believe to be irrelevant - we just ARE). But I do also believe that because of what we are, how we are, human beings should live their lives in certain ways - not kill, not steal, not lust or yearn after another's privileges or, should they have them, possessions. That children should be loved and cared for. So should the weak, unfortunate and poverty stricken.
This, and much more,  is my BELIEF SYSTEM. It is thus my creed and were I given to religious dogma I am sure I could create one to suit. After all so much of it is just as naturally part of other creeds. Maybe if there were an atheist's club then these people would get off their high horses and accept that atheism is a belief system.
Of course they are unlikely to do so since it seems to me that intolerance is the hallmark of the committed religious person. Indeed even the briefest examination of the history or almost all religions will show that mutual hate and intolerance is the key feature that marks them out from those without their kind of religion. Hinduism may just be the exception to prove the rule but up against the wall they too resorted to murder and mayhem after the Raj was kicked out.
Sadly it is my I fear that it is this intolerance that underpins the apparent  willingness of some to deride atheism as not being a religion. The process massages their own doubts and provides a kind of glue or scaffolding for their own belief system.  Perhaps their target is another group, the Humanists since they do look a bit like a religion from the outside.
But off course the same name callers are right in one way from which all atheists (not Humanists)  can take joy - many of us do not have dogma, a hierarchy, a priesthood, nor even an evangelical drive to proselytise our beliefs (well excluding dear old Dawkins of course).
But that does limit our name calling opportunities - it is gangs that fight. We are definitely not a gang, I will accept that.

I made a bit of a mess of this first time around so here goes again. 
On October 12 2012 I saw someone I greatly admire and frankly rather fancy turn from the years of pixels to persona. My fears that I might be disappointed were unfounded – the truth is that the charm, polish, and, IMO, beauty on TV are not an act; with Alice May Roberts it seems the joy of what you see is what you get. Phew!
Having got that out of the way (or my system) how did she do with her exposition of the effect of Ice Ages on the lives of the megafauna, early man and us – homo sapiens? Very well indeed and for a very important reason.
When Birmingham University created the chair of “engaging the public with science” and awarded it to then Dr Alice Roberts, anatomist, anthropologist of Bristol Uni and the BBC they got a bit of stick. And a few (misogynists?) even challenged her right to the post. Codswallop. Never has there been a time when engaging the public with science was more crucial. One only has to see, hear, even feel the activities of the fundamental Christian and Islamists et al to see how critical it is to improve public understanding of our world, our place and our origins. Dawkins can rant but something more subtle is essential. And here she is; Credible, communicative and charming. Who else then would Birmingham choose? I'd say she was a coup.
There is a fine line between a worthy but dull lecture and an enjoyable evening out. This was part of a Royal Geographical Society series and Alice delivered a solidly enjoyable, entertaining and informative discourse on the role of the ice ages in the development of man. That fine line was trodden with consummate skill and charm by Alice Roberts at Kings Lynn (how lucky they are to get her too.)
This was not only marked out by the accessibility of her content and delivery but her enthusiastic commitment to being correct and having evidence. Time and again she showed us what had been found, told us what was believed and then toured the doubts that nagged at her and would lead to further investigation. Along the way we entertainingly learned that gaining the knowledge and the insights is not a comfortable business. The BBC does not provide central heating on the Russian steppe or 5-star hotels on the ice shelf. An honestly nervy Alice explained how she learned to handle a rifle where there were Polar Bears (although I cannot imagine her using it even in anger) but picked a cliff edge pitch for her tent to put her colleagues between her and the bear access point. We heard too how she shared a frankly disgusting tepee affair with 11 snoring geezers! Our sense of envy died a little on the word eleven!
But we learned too how climate works, how we are even now within an ice age, or possibly just leaving one, or even in the midst of a much shorter Heinrich event. Whichever, the point was that not responding to our own worsening of the climate change situation was not really an option. And talk of “refugia” – last safe places for creatures overwhelmed by climate change - was given a scary climax with the fate of the Neanderthals. These probable cousins but certain companions as the ice descended from the north appear to have ended up clinging to Europe on the Rock of Gibraltar; I've been ther so know how they felt. Whether they just died out or modern man took a hand is not certain. Either way they are no more.
No more too are the mammoths – for which Alice has a fondness that should worry her own naughty terrier. But many miles north of Gibraltar the last few were similarly struggling on an Arctic island. Indeed the very last hung on until about 7,000 years before the modern era. Just missed them then.
And we got a preview of the CGI for her new programmes on BBC – arriving next year and then it was questions. And if anyone had any doubt of her commitment to veracity it came soon enough as the questions took her outside her own comfort zone: “I am very sorry but I haven't a clue” she said. To the truly sharing mind the acceptance of Homeric frailty is a proof of competence. Loved it Alice, but then I'm biased.