Well the weather has been fun. I think it is described as ‘wintery showers’. Not quite what I call being pelted by the ice equivalent of 12 bore every time you go out! Every night there have been thunder storms with very impressive lightning. Many people here have lost their phones / broadband because of this. I was feeling pretty smug as I had remembered to unplug the phone line each night. Well that is until Sunday evening, whilst I was on the mobile talking to Oliver, the lights went out and there was a load ‘crack!!’ and a flash from the ADSL router and all it’s lights went out. Not good I thought. This router is also the main router for the satellite broadband and our network so everything stopped. After I had finished talking to Oliver I dug out the router that came with the Tooway Satellite system and reprogrammed it to work with our network and after about ten minutes I was back on line! Phew! That was the culmination of an eventful weekend. Previously, on Saturday when I came back from seeing Father Christmas there were two large parcels in the porch. These were obviously Christmas presents so I tried to phone the supplier (very.co.uk), after an age on the phone and being asked for my account number and security questions several times I gave up and decided to try and find to owner myself the next day.

The next day was Sunday so I set off in the car to see if I could find the address, after a few minutes the heavens opened and the most determined blizzard started. I visited one of our neighbours and they knew where the address was that I was looking for, so after chatting to them for some time I bid them farewell and set off. When I got to the house that should have had this delivery the storm decided to turn up a notch, so much so that I could not open the car door as the wind was so strong! After it died down I tried to make myself heard at the house but it seemed that everyone was out. At this point I gave up and decided to try my luck with the other task set for the day, delivering some Christmas cards, how difficult could that be? The weather looked better down Burray way so I set off for there, forgetting about the possibility of the barriers being closed. Thankfully they were not. but the waves were breaking over them to such an extent, that I would not have wanted to drive with them any larger. But other cars were crossing so I thought it should be OK, which it was even though on several occasions the waves were such that I could not see the road or the side of the road or anything really, I just drove very slowly and got across the three sets of barriers with out a hitch.

I spent a very enjoyable time chatting to Neil, Catherine and Grace Corsie, by the time I left it was a bit too late to deliver the other cards so I decided to drive home. The drive was punctuated by the whole landscape lighting up as the lightning played around the island. The waves had died down a bit on the way back and although the journey was slow it was at least uneventful. I got home, still being pebble dashed by hails stones ( I know that Richard Hammond in his latest program said you don’t get thunder storms in the winter so you can’t get hail in the winter, well he should come up here! ), made a hot drink and decided to ring my son Oliver and that is when the router went bang !

After all this I decided that as long as the power stayed on I would sit down and watch a rubbish film on TV, I had had enough excitement for a weekend!