October 14th 2007
You can go so far with a digger and a shovel, and feel that you’re getting somewhere. We can put in a good day’s work and be pretty satisfied with ourselves, knowing that we are further along than we were the day before. Then you have a meeting about progress with the builder or the geometra and suddenly it’s all gone horribly wrong.
It might seem rather naïve or hapless, but it has honestly taken this long (about 9 months) for us to get a true picture of how much this is all going to cost. And it does always come down to cost.
So, we have had to take a deep breath and reassess our plans, moving not-so-smoothly to plan B, not a radical re-think but another series of compromises. I imagine that when it’s all finished we’ll have forgotten about plan A, and probably plan B too and will be happy with plan X. That’s what the wise heads tell me anyway.
So, I have been limiting myself to what I know I need to do, and hoping that the new drawings I am doing will work, or at least will save us enough money for us not to have to start looking at the Ryanair schedules quite yet.
Sport has been another issue with which I am struggling at the moment. You get the odd weekend in England when the national side is playing rugby, football and cricket all on the same day. These used to be exciting days for me, I suppose like those days for an Astronomer when planets are aligned on a moonless night. But then try to get excited about ‘watching’ it on a text printer via the BBC web-site. No commentary, no video, nothing except a refreshed page every 2 minutes, hoping that your dial-up internet access doesn’t crash, again.
There is an alternative. Sky. It can be done. But there is another problem. Right now England are doing well in rugby, football and cricket and I am strangely convinced that if I get to watch it all on Sky, something will happen and it will all start going wrong, and it will all be my fault. Sorry, can’t explain it, but it’s true.
The stupidest thing I did today;
Tried tuning in to Five Live for full commentary on the rugby just in case they had changed their mind about overseas broadcasting rights, or maybe my friend at the BBC had persuaded someone to not pull the plug...no chance.
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