Febuary is here .....

... and there are still holes in two ceilings and the tiles are still off in the shower room. When I am at my most argumentative I think I might make an ideal insurance company employee. If the job is - as I can only assume it must be - all about finding reasons for not allowing repair work to go ahead, I think I could wrangle and dispute until the customer found another solution. Fortunately, this bloody minded-ness works from the other side also and, now I have at last obtained one of the two required estimates for repair costs, I shall argue that I should be allowed to have the damage put right. A second estimate, I hear you say - have YOU ever tried to get two estimates? One has taken weeks, will I live long enough for a second to materialise? Watch this space...

Linlithgow is grey and cold, and we have just had the annual visit from BT concerning the telegraph pole at the bottom of the garden. Each year a new enthusiast arrives to tell us that BT will just be digging the pole up and replacing it - they never have any information on exactly how they will dig up the tallest pole in West Lothian and then take it out through the close, but they have spoken of digging machinery in the past. Through the close then down stairs, I don't think so. They are then puzzled when I ask whose permission they have to dig up a private garden in the first place - and then they go away and send a new innocent back the following year. I am not going to tell you for how long this nonsense has been happening, but it became boring some years ago. From where BT gets the notion that it rules the world, or at least this little bit of the High Street, I don't know - but I wonder what they would say if it were their garden in question.

Time for the happy pills I think.