oldbloke's mutterings

Well! Today's 5th gear wonder was all the way from the start of the 50 limit at the edge of Walsden to the Smithy Bridge turn-off - ie right through Summit and Littleborough without changing down. OK it helps that my car is happy to do 25 in 5th if you don't want much in the way of acceleration, but it's not bad going.
When L was off on maternity leave, I used to reckon if I reached the Howarth Cross roundabout before Our Tel came on, I wouldn't be late for work. I was past Oldham before Johnny started today, that's, like, about 8 miles further down the road. Of course with the drop off at nursery, I was still only 5 minutes early for work. But it's the first time I haven't been a bit late for, um, many months.

We thought about it and decided that as, in a month, we'd watched just one movie and taped two others, and never got around to the music channels, don't care about the news channels, the only sport we /really/ care about is F1 and that's on ITV, and Jack's still a bit young for any of the kid's stuff except CBeebies (and the others have adverts), if we went for anything at all it would be Variety+Knowledge. We've watched a few things in the Variety mix and one or two from Knowledge.
We um'd and ah'd for a good 5 minutes, and then decided 90quid for a year was bearable, even though it goes to Murdoch.
So I rang them today and they claim to be having trouble downloading updates to existing viewing cards and will have to post us another. Hmmm. It'd better have everything FreeSat had, that's all.