It’s been a bit of a fight with the internet provider but it seems they have now agreed with me that as I’m paying them a monthly fee, they probably should get on with making a connection and providing me internet access, so they sent someone to find the plug or to whatever it is that they need to do when customers move house. Goodness knows why big corporations find it so hard to handle this sort of thing. It also seems my cunning plan to keep entries appearing on a regular basis didn’t work as it was suposed to: unfortunately after getting the pictures up and ready, I didn’t have time to make the rest publishable before the connection went down, hence the silence, Sorry about that: I’ll rewrite those over the next few days. On the other hand I’ve come back to several kind comments and emails wishing us well with the move: many thanks for those.

The Xtracycle was used a lot in the move and at some point during the shuttling back and forth we managed to clock up 1000km since I accidentally reset the computer in February. This and the weight it’s been carrying help explain why the brake blocks were worn down to almost nothing, and were even showing bare metal at the back: the poor thing wasn’t made for this sort of punishment.

Anyway, we’re here: we have a garage that we can use, and which I’m making into a bike workshop, (more of that anon) in a network of relatively quiet streets we can cycle on without too much trouble from Mercedes Man: We can see green trees, the boys can get to the meadow to play within three minutes, and every couple of days a buzzard or two flies past, so on balance I’m happy…