Sometimes my B&B guests very kindly give me presents.  Occasionally tips even - that's particularly nice!

But last week I was given something much more valuable than that.  £750 worth of chemicals for making silage with! Packed in little silver foil pouches.

So I immediately offered them to Kind Neighbours, expecting to win lots of brownie points.  But unfortunately they make the wrong kind of silage.  It has to be clamp silage.  I tried my next neighbouring farmers, but the same story.

So they continue to take up space (and I think they're supposed to be refrigerated) on the 'this needs to go elsewhere' table by the back door. Do you know anyone who makes clamp silage that I can offer them to?

Sometimes it feels as though everywhere I look, just nothing, absolutely nothing, works.

I've had six weeks of no telephone landline; all four 'new' handsets bought off eBay turned out to be faulty; three months of no electric gate;  outside lights with minds of their own; no oil, pipes subsequently requiring bleeding; leaking overflow causing mildew; blocked macerator; stupid shower, leaks under the bath; the electric plug has come off the horse trailer which has also has yet another puncture; Marvin the Focus has been needing a new clutch; and Bill the Shogun seems to be on his last wheels, so that despite the fact I own two cars, I am stranded. I did actually begin to shed a few tears about all of this, which isn't like me at all.

And then a little glimmer of light began to twinkle in the distance.

The first amazing thing was that the Princetown Mower man came and collected my mower and strimmer the day after I asked him to, and a couple of days later brought them both back, fully serviced! That's a first! The landline eventually got sorted out (it went down again last Sunday, but one look at my file and BT fixed it again within hours!); I bought a fifth handset for £7 - a Binatone for deaf and blind people which has big buttons, and is very loud; the gateman is here right now; Godfrey has replaced the bulb in the outside light; Super Sexy Dick's son, plumber George fixed all the bathroom things, and Super Sexy Dick himself has just brought Marvin back £550 later as good as new, sorted out the trailer; and best of all, Bill isn't mended!

Instead, I am Queen of the Road, driving 'The Beast' - all 4.2 litre engine of it, at a stately pace all over the moor, averaging 28mph whilst consuming 22.3mpg of diesel.  Desperate to get Beloved Daughter to her horsey events, I rang all round Devon in an attempt to hire a 4x4. Nothing nearer than Exeter at £200pw.  And then I found a garage in Okehampton where they offered to mend Bill while lending me a 2004 Toyota Landcruiser Amazon as a courtesy car!! Well I asked them to take as long as possible over Bill, and they've still got him, over a week later.  I am chuffed to bits with my fantastic alternative.  I looked it up on AutoTrader and it's worth around £20,000!  I rang the garage up and implored them not to hurry with Bill and kindly, they still haven't started work on him!  Things are looking up!

The people I bump into most often at Lidl are my fellow local Dartmoor B&B proprietors.  Don't tell anybody!

I generally use Lidl to stock up on chocolate, scent (it's called 'Suddenly' and at £3.99 for a bottle was highly recommended by the Daily Mail recently), smoked salmon, gravadlax,  individual steamed haddock with brocoli dinners, frozen paella, kangaroo steaks and stuffed duck. 

But the best moment of any Lidl visit, is if I succeed in accurately guessing the number of bags I've got to buy in advance at 4p each, to pack away all my goodies in.  Four were enough to carry £120 worth of groceries, as well as a broom and a rake, last visit.

I had a brilliant idea of how to to get my own back on BT today.

In response to my £5000 small claim, they sent me a forty-ish page legal document, direct from their team of specialist lawyers, which was enough to scare the living daylights out of anyone, even me!  

I am reluctant to travel all the way to Northampton to face these professionals in court, when I have every reason to believe that BT's Terms and Conditions cover them for every complaint I have made, not helped by the fact that mine is a residential, not a business, line.  Did you know, for instance, that if you fail to be at home for an appointment, they will fine you £139, whereas if they fail to attend an appointment, with or without advising you, you can only reclaim £10? How fair is that?? Anyway, I really don't want to be bothered to read through all the blurb to check the various ins and outs - as I expect there's nothing we can do about them.  I expect BT and all the other Big Boys rely on all of their customers being equally lazy, and anyhow, what alternative do we have?

But I was impressed by how spending £100 on suing BT brought out their engineer straightaway.

So I have written to Sean Poulter, Consumer Editor of the Daily Mail.  He must have been at the paper for practically thirty years, as he was on my contacts list when I used to do a proper job - PR for sunglasses, skis, sports watches, you name it - back in the days when I was a yuppy with a red golf GTi, living in Fulham.  I suggested to him that my plight might strike a chord with many of his readers, and that we are all bullied by the Big Boys and helpless in the face of a near monopoly supplying a necessary product which is not fit for purpose.  That a normal person can't begin to understand the gobbledegook that comes back from their legal department if you try having a go at them; eg  "The Defendant therefore seeks that the Court exercise its case management powers in striking out the claim pursuant to Parts 3.4(a) and (c) of the Civil Procedure Rules", but that these big corporates all start grinding into action if we invest a little in suing them through the small claims on or off-line.  It doesn't even have to cost you as much as £100!

I havent sent the letter, but have forwarded it to BT News Office (who havent replied yet) suggesting that we settle out of court rather than going to any further trouble and expense over the matter. Included in my email were links to two recentish articles remarkably identical to the one I am proposing Mr Poulter might run, if BT doesn't play ball. They are:

www.theguardian.com/money/2012/jun/01/get-bt-listening-visit-hq#start-of-comments; and 
www.theguardian.com/money/2013/oct/13/bt-openreach-broadband-phone-fault?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487.

I'm feeling a bit nervous now, as it's possible I might have broken some law(s) over this, but what will they do to me? Fine me? Caution me? Or send me to prison? I've always thought it might be interesting to go to prison if I wasn't incarcerated for too long. Better than girls boarding school anyway. And I bet there are some other inmates in there who would be all too happy to join me in a moan about BT.


 

My Mum is the most supportive Granny in Beloved Daughter's year group.

Funny. When I was at school she once came to watch me in the swimming team, but she arrived late and missed my 13.2 seconds of fame as I won the 25 yards U13s Freestyle in its normal sub-zero conditions.

But now, even though she lives 1 1/2 hrs away in West Dorset - call that two if it's her driving - she attends lots of Beloved Daughter's events, and it is a real pleasure to see her there.

So we drove home in convoy after Friday night's Evensong, and as we entered the house I growled - "No one make any mess.  We've got visitors arriving on Sunday, the house has been cleaned at vast and expense, and we have no Sashka between now and then."  Within five minutes, dear Granny had walked a splodge of mud at repeated intervals starting at the outside door, across the hall carpet, up the stairs, and all the way along the landing carpet to 'Bellever' where she was sleeping.

I made myself scarce to lose my temper, while Beloved Daughter somehow made the mess disappear.

I thought the kitchen was smelling increasingly of oil, while Granny and I caught up with each other's news over turkey breasts in white wine and grapes - a signature dish I copied off Bridget Jones.

And by the morning my worst fears were confirmed. Both Aga and boiler were out of oil.

No oil means no hot water, no heating, no cooking facilities = no guests.

I have something called a Top Up System with Mole Valley Farmers, which I assume means they top up the tank every time they visit.

Apparently not.

Poor Granny had, again, to see the worst side of her middle child, as the air turned blue with my anguish. She gave up and went home.

This has happened once before, last time on Christmas Eve when the house was full of family, so this time I already knew that putting things right was not going to be easy. Mole Valley has no emergency number.  There are no oil companies on the internet who supply oil during the weekend.  Helpful Jake, at the Mole Valley outlet in Newton Abbot, which has almost nothing to do with the oil arm of the company, spent most of the day trying to find somebody to help.

Esteemed Partner advised that there might be a drop of oil in the second tank that I could run through to the first. Guided by Esteemed Partner, who was away, X dropped in to B&Q on his way down after watching Revered Son playing hockey, to buy some spanners to bleed the system, but all to no avail.

Astonishingly, at 6.30pm on Saturday night, I tracked down a plumber new to the West Country, who came round to bleed the system at 8.30 on Sunday morning.  £150 later - Bingo!  Lucky I dye my hair, or you would have noticed it turning grey as we speak.