Connections

Thanks for the positive response to yesterday’s postcard idea. I will set to work on this and find some nice cards and think if some suitable words or quotes and then try and give it a go. I might be one of the only people in the UK who makes use of the paper version of the BT phone book!

Yesterday I went out for lunch with my mum which was really nice. We were going to go for a bit of a walk as well but the weather was so miserable that we didn’t do that. I went back to my parents’ house afterwards and had a look at my parents’ TV. A few weeks ago my father found that he couldn’t record anything on his DVD recorder and didn’t know how to fix it. I messed about for ages and established that the problem was with getting a signal and that the DVD recorder was working just fine. I messed about with wires some more and then the conversation went as follows:

Me: Oh, you get your terrestrial signal through the old Cable box wiring.
Father: No, the signal comes through Sky.
Me: No, the Sky channels come through Sky but the terrestrial channels came through your old Cable wiring because it is plugged into the aerial socket.
Father: No that wiring doesn’t do anything. That’s why when the builders built a new wall for us a few weeks ago I told them they could cut that wire and remove it.
Me: *penny drops* Is that the same sort of time that you lost the TV signal?
Father: Yes, but it was fine for them to remove it because that isn’t how we get the signal.
Me: Erm, I think you’ll find that it was important. Did it not cross your mind that there might be a connection between them removing that wiring and you no longer having a TV signal??

Clearly it hadn’t crossed his mind because it was only after I actually took him through the wiring system that he could accept that the Cable signal was actually quite important. Oops. Anyway, after some searching through loads of wires (and cobwebs. Yuck.*) I managed to find the original aerial that they used to get their TV signal before Cable or Sky were even dreamed of and got their TV signal back and then I retuned the TV and DVD recorder and got it all working again. Sometimes I despair of my father and his ability to think laterally.

On other matters, if you are in any important business meetings today, it might be worth noting that the quality of the biscuits could make the difference as to whether you clinch the deal. The advice seems to be to go for chocolate digestives. I’m not sure that I see them as what I would think of as quality biscuit, but maybe other people have simpler tastes than me. My personal favourites are those ones that usually come in gold wrappers and have a layer of orange fondant in them and are then coated in milk chocolate. I might agree to pretty much anything after one of those.


*My parents have a clean a house by the way. This was down the back of some cupboards.