Crackle, crackle

For several weeks now my phone has been crackling badly. My broadband, which arrives via the phone line, has become more and more unreliable.

The company, BT (short for British Telecom, which used to be a publicly-owned monopoly) installed my first telephone line 40 years ago. My current line was installed in this house in the mid/late 1960s. It was my school friend Lesley's number. I later bought the house from her parents. The line enters the house from a telephone pole across the road. To me it is obvious that the line outside is really vulnerable, but when the line started to fail I couldn't persuade BT of that. They wanted me to commit £129 before they would book an appointment. Someone on the other side of the world, who had no idea what was outside my house, insisted it might be a problem inside the house.

So after 40 years, I left BT and let Sky take over responsibility for my phone line. Gradually the problem got worse, so the other day I booked an appointment to have the repair done. If the fault was found to be with my equipment, I would be billed £99 after the fact. Knowing what I knew, it was a deal I was happy to go for.

Yesterday my next door neighbour had an engineer at her house for hours. A couple of weeks ago the people next door to her had an outside repair done. While my chap was working today, an engineer came to look at another line two doors away. Gosh, I wonder if maybe these ancient lines ALL need replacing?

The wear on the piece of line he removed was appalling. It's a surprise it worked at all. In fact, just before he arrived, I had lost the dialling tone, my line was dead.

But now everything appears to be fixed! Cross all fingers.