Tales of the Unexpected

Another week, another series of weird coincidences and seemingly unbelievable developments that make me wonder whether I am actually living in some rural Matrix.

Thing one, road contractor arrives along with a whole host of seriously enormous diggers and machinery ready to start work on our new Forge superhighway. Turns out it’s the same guy I got my first pet lamb from about 30 years ago. I know North Wales is a small place and all but what are the chances?!  Perhaps less unexpected is the classic Welsh weather which delayed us by two weeks and has now rendered the whole place a complete mudfest. 

The Forge new superhighway

Thing two, car won’t start. Not a flat battery. Not a dodgy spark plug. Nada, no life. Call out the RAC man to be told, and I shit you not, that a mouse has nibbled through the fuel pipe. Now you know you’ve got to take your rodent problem in hand when they are chowing down on the bloody vehicles! The perfect excuse for yet more smallholding gadgetery, this time in the form of a chicken powered hen feeder, that only works when the chooks stand on the platform to open the trough. Genius. 

Open sesame!

Thing three, just when I am close to a nervous breakdown with the shockingly unreliable broadband service from a well-known telecoms provider (not to mention any names, BT YOU BUNCH OF FECKLESS HALF-WIT IDIOTS) it turns out EE have launched a new service which means you can get superfast internet connection through your 4G signal. So, I’ve gone from a crushing depression when it turned out that BT had happily sold us fibre broadband and charged us handsomely for the privilege when NO SUCH THING EXISTED IN OUR AREA and I obsessively monitored the download speed of between 0.2 and 3mb per second (trust me, when your life depends on the internet you become ultra-obsessive about these things) to a guaranteed 30+mbps for ever more. I am still weeping with joy. 

Thing four, more good news. If it was not the broadband that was slowly breaking me one day at a time then the motorbikes and boy racers passing the house at the speed of sound were a close second. So, I practically grabbed the lovely gentleman from the Highways Agency by the cheeks and planted a big smacker on his lips when he turned up at the door this week to tell us that they are putting in place average speed cameras on our road. Ha! Take that you Valentino Rossi wannabes!

And finally, yet more good news. Our planning application for more bell tents and our Canadian style trappers’ huts has been granted! With unbelievable ease and lack of hassle. We can barely believe it and keep double checking the paper work for the catch. But no. It seems we are good to go. So it’s full steam ahead for Phase 2 of The Forge. Just the tiny detail of getting Phase 1 completed first. But hey it’s valid until 2023 so we have a little time. 

So seems like we are on the up and up. For now at least. Until they change that matrix code...