Here's my late lunch after I finally got everything cleared up and put back to rights:
That's those tomatoes and cucumber I got the other day, with 8 Sail Ale Chutney from Heckington Windmill and two kinds of Lymn Bank cheese - I forget which two, I got 6 of them in a 3 for a fiver deal from the Papworth's, the butcher in Coningsby a couple of weeks ago. I had this nice sarnie with a couple of those pears.
The bread I made by hand from Heckington flour - I've been using a bread machine since a couple of years ago, when my friend Tony kindly gave me his which he wasn't using. This was mainly because the house I was living in was so cold (all year round!) that there wasn't really anywhere for me to put the dough to rise, but since I moved to this place in early August I've been making use of the airing cupboard, as hand-made does come out so much nicer than the machine can make it. It's Mauripan yeast - not local! - because I bought a couple of kilos of it a few months ago, so that gives me time to investigate local versions. I've been meaning to start using fresh yeast actually...
I got mixed up about the satellite guy, he's actually meant to be coming on Friday! This is satellite broadband, which is effectively the only way to get usable internet 24 hours in areas like this. To be fair to our county council and the good old European Union, they've been pouring money into the Onlincolnshire project, which has already made a massive difference all over the county. Frustratingly, they've just upgraded the village I just moved from to fibre optic! But when they made their plans this house had been derelict for decades and I suppose they didn't expect anyone would ever live here again, so no plans were made to install the appropriate infrastructure. They weren't to know that Revesby would suddenly take it into their heads to renovate and re-let this place.
So what I've got is a 1.5mb connection which I pay well over the odds for because all but the two worst value ISP's won't provide a service to here. It's 1.5mb in the daytime and in the evening it fluctuates between about 512k and just "off"! At the weekend - forget it.
Of course the first thing my city friends say is "Why don't you just use mobile internet?" and I smile and roll my eyes, because anyone who's spent a reasonable amount of time in remote areas would know it's foolish to assume you will even have enough of a 2G signal to send a text, let alone stable, usable 3G. As for 4G, it's yet to even cross the Trent as far as I know. Here, if I go upstairs, I have just enough signal - and only from EE - to send a text. Outdoors, if I walk up the hill a bit, I can get enough to make a call.
So, satellite it is. It is more expensive, but I'd rather pay a bit more and actually have something I can use, than pay anything at all for something that's useless.
This is what's known as the Digital Divide. Those of us who live in remote areas are more dependent than anyone on reliable telecoms and transport, yet we have less of it than anyone else, though we usually pay more for what little we do have. It's already starting to be recognised that an internet connection is an essential utility in this society, perhaps even more so than a landline was 20 years or so ago, and that recognition is what's fuelling projects like Onlincolnshire.
Now, if we could just get them to acknowledge that having a car is not a luxury for people round here...!
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