Where's your wife?

Talking of customer care as I was in my last blog, our recent Christmas stay in Wales introduced me to new levels of customer care that I never knew previously existed.  Little did I know when we booked into our 5-star accommodation that the owner would take such a keen interest in our care, especially that of my wife.

You may have seen in a previous blog about a stay in Cornwall; our family car chews up driving miles and spits them out like they barely exist.  It is a great credit to the makers, to allow a 6-hour journey to pass with so little effort or fatigue.  It helps when the media centre provides wifi.  Although technically, this will enable us to see train and plane timetables live, as well as congestion updates for the sat nav, we tend to get far more from the wifi provided.  My two boys listen to YouTube stuff on their headphones, while my wife and I stream through the audio the Royal Institute Christmas Lectures, Holby City, podcasts, and fab stuff like Tricity Vogue "The Blue Lady Sings" - the kind of emetic content our boys would rather not be troubled with.

We find ourselves renting out a small cottage within a working farm in Brongest, Newcastle Emlyn in Wales.  The owners could not have been more welcoming.  The chap who I'm sure was about ten years older than me but acted like he was 25 years younger, had this habit of turning up unannounced to the front door, taking his boots off, and stepping inside for a friendly chat.  He did it no less than three times on Christmas Day.  He was keen to let us know from the start of our stay that he was working with the cows until 11 pm and was up with them again at 4 am.  "How wonderful," I thought, not truly appreciating the significance to our stay.

We had some wonderful trips.  My wife and I love our walks.  When I turned 50 earlier this year, never did I imagine how carefully I would keep my eye on my wife inside and outside the cottage.  I rather hoped those days were behind me.  I noticed our friendly Welsh friend was coming into the cottage and asking "Where's your wife?" if she wasn't instantly in his sights.  I don't know if you can imagine the laughs me and the boys had mimicking his Welsh accent asking "Where's your wife?". 

One of the journeys was from Brongest to Carmarthen where I saw a police officer off his motorbike doing a speed check with a hand-held device; blimey, it's been a while since I saw that happening - how refreshing to witness.  On the way back from Carmarthen I was driving and spontaneously blurted out a "Aha... thought so" when an oncoming motorcyclist came around a rural road bend.  My kids asked me what I was referring to, which I embarrassingly mumbled something when I realised my mouth had verbalised my thoughts.  Little did they want me to start explaining about "defensive driving".  There is a lovely description offered by the DVSA on pages 2 & 3 of their "better driving" book.

I found us travelling behind a mini-bus at one point where I started having flashbacks of the driving licence Cat D enquiries I'd recently been making with the DVLA and DVSA on behalf of a school who was wondering if they had to train up teachers when they drive the school mini-bus specifically.  "Calm down Tom, calm down, you're on holiday".   I noticed our car does quite an intelligent thing.  Not being at all interested in these things, I have no idea how it does this, but when the car senses that you are driving down a steepish hill (about 16% gradient is pretty standard in Wales), it keeps it in the lower of the 8 gears available and automatically prevents the car from increasing speed with absolutely no input from me.  Blimey, that is clever.

By about the 4th night, I found myself waking up at 2.30am with what I thought was "Dim problem" repeatedly going off in my head.  An aphorism which our owner likes to mention on his many visits (as was evidenced by the write-ups by previous tenants in the holiday book at the cottage).  "Dim problem", "Dim problem"; turned out it was a cow making this most strange noise.  Forget any idea of a "moo", I looked out the window and saw loads of these cows milling around very slowly.  "When do they sleep?" I thought as I sat up until 4.40am.  "You're on holiday Tom" I mumbled as I was rocking in the corner, dribbling out the corner of my mouth.

The writing was kind of on the wall from Day 1, to be honest.  We had a rather large dining table which was only being lit by 2 of a possible eight led overhead lights.  Now, this usually wouldn't be a problem to us, light schmight.  But although the accommodation was advertised with "Wifi" it turns out that wasn't strictly, what's the word, true.  There was no wifi.  Not slow wifi, no wifi.  Which was curious as our walks regularly showed us BT green cabinets on the verges indicating 'super-fast' broadband fibre was in existence.  So all the pre-Christmas plans my wife and I had made to secure the smooth running of our 14-year-olds new XBox came to nothing.  As a result, one of the board games "Civilization" became something of a 'backstop' I think the Government would call it.

Have you played "Civilization"?  Wow.  If you consider yourself somewhat of a technophobe, this is your board game.  I can happily provide anyone with a pristine, sealed version as I inadvertently ordered two pre-Christmas from Amazon.  If you are not familiar with it, take it from me that 'bad light stops play'.  But these issues are "dim problem" it seems.  

"Dim bloody problem".