The last few days have been rather hectic; however, we have
done it. We are safely installed in our new home. The telephone engineer turned up at 12.30
rather than 10.00; the energy rating of the house turned out to be
"E" rather than the "C" we were told it would be (more of a
problem for the winter than the summer) and the gas bottle that supplies the
hob was empty, but all in all it was relatively disaster free.
We got one of our first insights into village life when we
discovered the reason for the telephone engineer. There are a number of new homes being built
around us by what appears to be an extended family. It seems that when the house nearest to us was
built, the owner paid for all of the cabling for the power and telephones to be
buried in the road. Then, when this
house was built, the utility companies simply used the pipes he had installed to
supply it with power and a telephone line.
I don't know the rights and wrongs of the situation (are
conduits buried in the road a public good there for anybody to use?) but the
person who had paid for the original installation felt a bit miffed and dug a
"drainage ditch" that went from nowhere to nowhere but, on its way,
cut through our telephone cable. Ah, the
joys of village life.
