Going underground

The charming fellows from Wessex Water, our local provider of the wet stuff, have been probing into the ground under the guise of "fixing a water leak". In their enthusiasm to liberate as much earth from below the road as possible, it seems they have liberated all of us in our road from the strangling noose of the telephone system.

When I approached them to enquire about such things, they pre-empted my intrusion, and hailed me thus:

Gentleman with metal pole: "You're not tellin' us your phone's off, are you?"

Me: "Um, yes. Get that often, do you?"

Different gentleman by digger: "yeah, that was my fault. BT have been informed... maybe you should call them and tell them that you've been cut off, that you have a very dependent elderly mother... might speed them up a bit."

So, with all the details of our impending End to End cycling trip stored in my email, and an 'ETR' (Estimated Time of Repair) from BT of next Thursday, I'm at a friends' house, trying to extract all the information I need from any internet-based sources, and put it in offline format.

Joy; felicitation!

In other news, I popped down to Lee Abbey last week for a game of Scrabble (TM) with Tim'n'Mim. The 94 miles of unicycling to get down there was largely enjoyable, especially the first two hours, during which I got 25 miles without dismounting. That's all the way to Wells. Woo.

The South Westerly headwind became unpleasant, and conspired with the North Devon hills to make the last 20 miles exceedingly hard. Note to self: do not unicycle across the top of Exmoor. It's very windy. Wind and unicycles don't mix.

Cunningly, our direction of travel should be going with the prevailing wind, and not going up and down various 25% hills too much. Also, we shouldn't have to be doing that after 70 miles of riding earlier in the day.