So, back over to G&P's pad and the quest, for me, to get their ISDN lines installed and, for Daisy, the quest to find that secret stash of ham that's obviously buried somewhere in their garden.
Even more incredibly (more incredible than finding buried ham, that is) a France Telecom engineer turns up shortly after 3 o'clock.
Good grief. And it turns out he was the chap who was here yesterday when the phone lines were destroyed by the furniture delivery chap. He was the one who re-strung the lines. Indeed, it was he who gave directions to the furniture chap when he met him in the village - the FT engineer was here yesterday, it turns out, doing the first part of the ISDN installation but, because he spent all his time restringing lines, didn't have time to finish the job. Good grief. The furniture chap, FT Man says, brought down the phone lines because his truck is 4.1 metres tall and, as Any Fule Kno, phone lines in France are only 4 metres high. Aha.
The bad news is that, despite yesterday's work, the ISDN installation still doesn't work. He plugs his testing widget into the socket and his mate down at the exchange starts sending test signals. The criterion for a successful test is that it (a) runs for 15 minutes and (b) comes up with zero errors. And while the test does run for 15 minutes the bad news is that it comes up with something in the order of 20,000 errors. Blimey.
So he and matey down at the exchange fiddle all afternoon. I pop in now and then to check, but progress is always just about zero. Distance from the exchange, those downed lines (Did you know your neighbours have no working phone lines at all now? wonders FT man) and This Being France Telecom all conspire against us until, magically, at 5 pm it Just Works. Blimey.
Now I get to spend an hour frantically trying to get all the online updates installed and then trying to persuade Gordon to come see how to use this. I have to leave by 6 pm at the very, very latest to get back in time for my saxophone lesson, but tragically don't get out of the house until quarter past, so hard is it to get him off the phone.
It looks like I might only be a few minutes late until Mad* Woman Next Door accosts me in our car park, as I'm struggling to get out of the car, get Daisy into the house and me and my sax out again as quickly as possible.
Do I think it might be possible to drive a little more slowly than that? she wonders. There are cats around here, I should know, and I might hit one if I'm not careful. I respond to the effect that I'm in a real hurry, that if I see one of her bloody cats then I'd be aiming to hit it not avoid it since they all use our garden as a toilet and that, frankly I don't give a damn about them, that if we're talking about nuisances let's talk about her husband, Mr Electrical Woodworking Guy who works at midnight on Sundays filling the air with workshop noise pollution as he makes new bee hives (I am not making this up) and that, if she's really concerned about the drive up to our house let's also talk about her legal responsibility for paying half the upkeep costs which she resolutely denies being responsible for.
OK, I may have also sworn at her in English, too, but that doesn't excuse her then standing in the middle of said drive as I tried to leave and haranguing me again and guaranteeing that I'm definitely late for my sax lesson.
When I get to Monoblet, Françoise has already packed up - the kid who has the lesson before me managed to drop his instrument, destroying it, so she's been kicking her heels for half an hour now. Oops, sorry, it's the mad woman and France Telecom's fault.
The door is the key.
tramadol