Tag Archives: phones

Almost 10 years ago the husband of one of my former Walker colleagues died of pancreatic cancer. Jenni later moved down to Dorset. We had Jenni’s phone number but, of course, what we didn’t have was a mobile phone signal – we are, after all, in darkest Dorset. The day after our arrival I had wandered up to the main gate where I got a glimmer of a mobile phone signal – enough, at least, to talk to Jenni. I warned her I might lose the connection any second. She was not surprised, being unable to get a mobile signal in her house. Neither can she receive any terrestrial TV signal. Marvelous stuff, this technology! Having succeeded in making an arrangement against all odds, today we were meeting for lunch.

Setting off just after 10:00 AM and timing our approach call carefully to coincide with the presence of some kind of signal, Jenni managed to give us directions to her cottage. We found her with no difficulty, and what a delightful situation she has, assuming you don’t mind a complete lack of telecommunications.

After lunch accompanied by a bottle of Cava to celebrate our reunion, we drove (Ed: I had only one glass) the 5 miles or so to Shaftsbury, “a Saxon hilltop town” to the north. Shaftesbury is home to a TV star. Anyone of sufficient age may remember and old TV advert/commercial for Hovis bread. The advert depicted a precipitously steep cobbled street with a strongly Yorksire accented voiceover along these lines: “… when‘t smell crept up from th’oven …”. The street in question was Gold Hill. Is it in Yorkshire? No, not at all; it’s in Shaftesbury, Dorset. It is certainly very steep and mercifully quite short. It is also undoubtedly very picturesque and draws many onlookers – the sort of street where shy people shoudn’t live.

On our way back, having clambered back up Gold Hill with no accompanying smell of freshly baked bread emanating from any oven, we called into a local delicatessen and invested £4.95 in a local cheese, also labelled Gold Hill and made from unpasteurized milk, to remind us of our visit.

An excellent day and it was great to see Jenni again.

Another fine morning with another fine day in prospect, albeit with a similar cold northerly(ish) wind. We decided against giving the legs a rest and embarked upon one of neighbour Chris’s favourite walks. This would start and end in Kingston (where I spotted a very handy looking pub to refresh foot-weary walkers), taking us to Kimmeridge Bay and along the coast to the curiously named Houns-tout Cliff – sounds vaguely French.

We parked in Sheeps Pen car park and struck out towards Swyre Head through some of the aforementioned sheep. We started in the shelter of one of this region’s many skilfully made dry stone walls. Carol’s phone beeped with a message which at least indicated the presence of some kind of mobile signal. “Welcome to France” it proclaimed, wittily. Gobsmacked! How wide is the English Channel at this point? It must be 100 miles-ish ‘cos it takes ferries 4 – 6 hours to make the crossing from here. At the campsite we can’t pick up a signal from England but here, near the coast, we seemed to be picking one up from France. Nah, surely not.

Pleased to be back in our beloved France, we continued along a very windy, exposed ridge towards Kimmeridge itself and Kimmeridge Bay beneath. I failed to spot a pub in Kimmeridge – must be some kind of oversight – but the church was quaint, housing several graves of la familie Clavell Mansell who seemed particularly keen on the rifle regiment.

We’re on the so-called Jurassic coast or fossil coast. Kimmeridge Bay was full of people calmly pulling apart the cliffs and smashing small bits of rock against large bits of rock looking for fossils. I began wondering if there had been a bay here at all originally or whether it may have been picked into existence by masses of fossil hunters. You’re not supposed to use hammers but you don’t seem to need a hammer to break bits off the cliff. Folks were managing admirably with their bare hands.

Overlooking Kimmeridge Bay is an imposing folly called Clavell Tower. There’s that name again. Clavell Tower is now owned by the Landmark Trust, the same chaps that own Wortham Manor where we recently stayed to celebrate Rosemary’s birthday. They’ve had to do some serious work on this property, dismantling it and moving it back from the cliff’s edge. Clearly I wasn’t the only one worried about the rate of erosion caused by those fossil hunters.

I took my phone out to tweet. Unbeknownst to me it had received a message: “Welcome to France. Calls to the UK are 35ppm …”. Mon Dieu, moi aussi!

We continued along a roller-coaster coast towards that intriguingly named Houns-tout Cliff. As we approached the scale becomes evident; it looked like a beast of a climb. We carried on perhaps just a little daunted and scaled it. As I reached the summit I came across a chap sitting on a bench admiring the view. From his accent, I suspect he was German. As we were taking a snap or two, his phone beeped. He laughed. It seemed that his phone had just welcomed him to France as well. Weird!

The descent of Houns-tout Cliff was even more precipitous than the ascent but it was the only realistic way of finishing our 10 miles and getting to that pub I’d spotted in Kingston for a well deserved beer. It had good views of Corfe Castle in the distance, too.

I’ve been to Dorset before but it was so long ago that I really have no recollection about it. So essentially, our journey into Dorset today was taking me into pastures new so I was quite excited. It’s also a bit of a departure for us because we were heading for a commercial campsite, not a Caravan Club site nor a Caravan Club CL (Certificated Location – a field of 5 vans with no facilities which is generally our preferred type of haunt). The reason for this deviation is that this is our twice postponed – once for health and once for snow – New Year trip. Originally, we needed an all year hard-standing site.

We left right on schedule at 10:00 AM and after a pleasantly uneventful 3½ hours of travelling we were checking in. We’d been allocated a pitch so that took away any decision making on our part. We’re sometimes not good at making pitch selection decisions – we’ve only been doing it for 25 years, after all. The grass pitches are still not being used so hard-standing it was; not our favourite but quite understandable. Billy’s mover behaved itself and we were soon pitched up.

I’d promised to call my mother and let her know when we were safely installed. I turn on my mobile and prepared to invest a little cash in maintaining family relations. No signal, not a single bar! Unbelievable!! Are we stuck in the wilds of the Scottish glens? Are we in some forgotten hinterland? Are we in the back of beyond? You wouldn’t have thought so; there are three large campsites down this road and we are a mere 3 or 4 miles from Wareham – not that far from Swanage. This is Touristville, Dorset – a central part of the overcrowded English south coast. There are some trees around and a few less-than-serious hills topping out at about 600 feet but I would have hoped there wasn’t anything significant enough to stop a mobile signal. This technology might be useful one day, when we can make it work.

I wandered up to the main gate where my phone eventually condescended to give me a single bar of signal strength and checked-in with mater. All was well, other than having to strain to hear over the road traffic and cars entering the campsite.

I spotted some other poor soul suffering from technological advancement standing on the grassy play area near the main gate on a mobile phone. Strewth!

Today preparations for our approaching trip to France began in earnest. After a crack of dawn trip to Heathrow to collect a niece returning from Australia for a couple of weeks, Carol began by putting a load of washing in our machine. I set about washing and waxing our caravan, Billy, so that he’d look presentable, at least to begin with, on the foreign camp sites.

After an intermission for a downpour which held off long enough to finish the marathon caravan cleaning, I set about washing and leathering our car. This sparkling cleanliness is likely to last about as far as Dover but one simply must make an effort not to let the side down.

Our neighbours, Paul and Liz, had kindly invited us round to christen their paella pan and paella ring recently hand-imported from Spain. That meant that we had plenty of time for our cleaning chores since we had no food preparations of our own to worry about. Just before going round to start the evening’s socializing, I wondered where my mobile phone was; it desperately needed charging. I’d had it in my pocket for Carol’s dawn patrol to Heathrow. Now where was it? Ah, I’d changed into my scruffy trousers for the grubby tasks of caravan and car washing. Carol had grabbed my discarded trousers to launder them ready for France. Gulp!

I can now report that, according to practical experimentation, a Nokia 2630 tends not to survive a washing machine cycle at 30°C, not even using Persil colour Small and Mighty. It actually looks grubbier than when it went in. I wonder if it would have fared better with the modern ranges of washing products that claim to be able to clean things “from as low as 15°C”? . It might be interesting to see whether it was the immersion in water, the tumbling in a stainless steel drum or the temperature of the cycle that proved terminal. Maybe I should buy a replacement and try.

The SIM card seems to be OK since it appears to work in Carol’s mobile phone. SIM cards must be made of sterner stuff.

Serves me right for buying a lightweight mobile phone that is actually portable, I suppose. When I had a mobile house brick, I’d never have inadvertently left it in a cargo pocket ‘cos I’d have heard it hit the floor changing my trousers.

So, my bargain basement new Nokia 2630 phone/camera/radio device now seems to be fully functional. This satisfying minor success followed a considerable amount of judicious debugging (it’s good to know I haven’t switched off completely since retiring) in which my phone calls to both O2 and Nokia support, combined with a 20-mile round trip to an O2 shop in Milton Keynes to get a new SIM card, probably cost getting on for as much as the phone/camera/radio thingy in the first place.

Carol has possessed a camera-equipped phone for a couple of years. We even used it once to take a photograph of Beastie and Billy (our car and caravan) in pole position for a swift getaway in the car deck of a P&O ferry. Accessing the photographs on Carol’s phone is quite easy since it has a USB connection. Does my phone/camera/radio have a USB connection? No, apparently not.  There is a connection that looks a little like a USB socket but the manual makes contains the following warning:

Note: Do not touch this connector as it is intended for use by authorized service personnel only.

 

Yikes, best leave that alone! How, then, do I look at the crappy photographs taken by the phone’s crappy camera on anything other than the microscopic screen of the phone/camera/radio itself? My options appeared to include an expensive email message sending them as attachments and a wireless Bluetooth® connection. Naturally, being hardly of the mobile phone generation, I was not already Bluetooth® enabled. However, here was, perhaps, a fine excuse to become Bluetooth® enabled. Isn’t technology fun? A little investigation revealed several relatively inexpensive (~£10) Bluetooth® USB adapters that should Bluetooth®-enable my desktop computer.

A brief side issue. The Airmiles program has recently introduced utterly outrageous new rules enabling them to expire their customers’ hard-earned miles:

Our terms and conditions have changed to say, if you’ve not had any Airmiles added to your account for 24 consecutive months, all Airmiles you’ve collected will expire.

The bastards! It is apparently not enough that we have to contend with our blackguardly bankers losing all our money and, courtesy of dramatically falling interest rates, a serious chunk of our income, we are also required to contend with other unscrupulous scoundrels ripping off any other remaining assets. It seems that absolutely everyone is out to screw us.

Returning to the main thread, I noticed that buying a Bluetooth® USB adapter from John Lewis through the Airmiles program should earn me a princely 2 air miles. Whilst this isn’t enough even to get me down the main runway at Heathrow, it should be enough to keep my existing 7940 air miles alive. I ordered one.

Today my new toy arrived and I eagerly unpacked it and installed it. The Bluetooth® technology comes with a lot of new buzzwords such as "pairing" (sounds quite enjoyable) but eventually I conquered the vocabulary and got it to communicate with my new phone/camera/radio thingy. How better to try out the new toy combination than by taking a picture of my long-suffering wife? Having pointed the phone/camera/radio in the appropriate direction, i.e. at Carol, I pressed the button and it went "click" indicating, I supposed, that I was using the camera rather than the phone or radio. I sent it via Bluetooth® to my desktop and opened it in a picture editor.

Very generously, Carol has given me permission to display the somewhat startling results publicly. She is, after all, wearing a pleasant smile. In looking at the full size image (640 by 480 pixels) linked to the thumbnail on the right, please bear in mind that the camera was set to high quality. Ye Gods! I dread to think what the result would have been had a lower quality been selected. Way back in the stone age, Kodak introduced some particularly awful disc film technology (celluloid, not computer disc) which, hitherto, had produced some of the worst pictures I’ve ever clapped eyes on. Compared to this, though, its results were worthy of the eminent Lord Lichfield (RIP).

I know I said the phone camera would be crappy but I didn’t expect it to be this crappy. Marketing anything this bad is completely pointless.