I am away for the next two weeks and so am going to post some photos which didn’t make it into original posts. I will be back posting regularly after Christmas.
Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category
British Butterflies: Small Tortoiseshell
Posted: August 20, 2019 in Announcements, Butterflies and Moths, Natural HistoryTags: Small Tortoiseshell
The Small Tortoiseshell is one of the UK’s commonest garden butterflies. It may hibernate over winter and so is one of the species that can be seen on warm days throughout the year.
It is found across a wide geographic area stretching from Western Europe to China and Japan. There are even a few records from New York but this may have been deliberately released there.
It took 24 hours longer than anticipated but we got our internet connection. Today the engineer located a break in a cable which had totally killed our system. All fixed now.
So we have a new router and are now waiting for the connection tomorrow and then hopefully normal service will be restored.
The last 5 weeks have been quite a eye-opener as far as how much we use the internet. If you had asked me before I would have said we were light users – email, this blog, some video watching but nothing with any great impact. But once it isn’t there you suddenly realise how much you do use it.: looking up train times, the weather, checking what’s on TV or checking the answers to questions etc etc…. It has been astonishing how many times we have gone to do something and ‘oh no we cant do that, there’s no WiFi!’
Still as they say tomorrow is a new day………Hopefully!
So the internet stayed connected for 3 days this time! But now its down again.
A lady from the ISP phoned me yesterday on my mobile (our landline isn’t working as its on the same supplier) to ask why we were changing. I told her we had 5 days service in the last 5 weeks and that was very slow. She said she was very sorry to hear that and asked had I reported it. I said I had but had no response from the ISP. She was sorry for that too! When I asked her about the problems and whether our money was going to be refunded for lack of service, she told me that wasn’t her department she only dealt with cancellations. I refrained from saying she must be very busy at present!
Checked ISP site – no problems reported. Checked independent monitoring sites nationwide complaints about lack of service!
Roll on the 14th when hopefully normal service will be resumed with new ISP.
Well the good news is we have an internet connection again this morning, but the problem is can I trust it? The connection has come back before for periods of hours and then stopped. In all I guess we have had about 4 days connection in 5 weeks!
Still no explanation from ISP! Anyway we are changing ISP, but they can’t do it till the 14th (too many other people changing?). Interesting that we have had no communications from ISP about disruptions in service, but had an email within 30 minutes when they found out that I was changing supplier!
Roll on the 14th. Just hoping the connection stays on till then.
We got the internet back at 10.30pm last night and I resolved to catch up on posts this morning. But you guessed it, when I woke this morning it wasdown again. I have tried posting on public WiFi at the coffee shop but it is just too slow to handle images, so will need to try somewhere else.
In the meantime I will continue reposting a series on UK castles I have visited over the years.
We still have no internet or phone at home but I have been able to find somewhere to work where I can do my blog posts. I am going to post a couple of posts on Castles in Kent for the next two days and then hopefully I can begin to catch up on my recent travels from Thursday.
We have been without internet and phone for 8 days now! As I was travelling last week I had put up the posts in advance but am now back home and severely limited in what I can do. So new posts from my recent travels will have to wait and I will try to continue posting as best I can till normal service is resumed.
It is only when you don’t have something you begin to understand quite how much you have come to depend on it.
This tree, near the Abbey in St Albans, was one of a number planted as war Memorials in England following the First World War. They came from acorns and chestnuts collected from trees that remained standing on the battlefield of Verdun, which were then brought to England and distributed to Towns and cities across the country. Some such as the one at Lichfield have been replaced by trees grown from acorns of the original Verdun Trees planted in this country and in 2016 the Woodland Trust launched a project to ensure the continuation of the Verdun Trees by growing new trees from their acorns, which can be used to replace any that die.
The tree in St Albans was planted in 1976 from an original Verdun acorn.
