We get enmeshed

Well, if you’re looking for drama, how about the we-nearly-burned-our-new-house-down excitement? “Where’s that smoke coming from?” asked Helen, standing by the bathroom window in the glow of the morning sun. I followed her gaze and saw one of the wooden pieces of the window frame apparently steaming. Moisture evaporating in the sun perhaps? Then I noticed the bright pinpoint of light in the centre of the “steam” and realised that the magnifying mirror which jutted out from the wall by the window was focusing the sun’s rays on a point on the frame and it was on the verge of going up in flames. We’ll see if we can top that next week. The only other danger we’ve faced this week was the danger to my mental health of sorting out the wifi.

The must-have networking aid these days is “mesh” wifi. This is basically the same as what we used to call a wifi extender, except it costs twenty times as much, because it’s, er, “mesh” rather than “extender”. Whereas an extender just takes the wifi signal and passes it on to another area of the house, the “satellites” in a mesh network do the same, but communicate with each other while doing it, because…er…..well the benefits are obvious. I wish it gave the facility to listen in to their communication:

“Keith? Keith? KEITH!!”

“Ray, is that you?”

“Yeah. Listen, I’ve got some wifi if you need any.”

“Yeah, why not. Bung it over and I’ll see if I can find a home for it.”

Keen as always to avoid spending any money at all, I brought down a non mesh satellite we’d been using in London and hooked it up to the main hub. Bingo - the house had wifi at either end, nothing in the middle, and each end had a different network name. Since in such situations H can easily turn into her namesake in The Long Good Friday, I started casually perusing the online reviews of mesh setups. Colleagues were complimentary about them (thank you to several correspondents for sharing their recommendations). The reviews were glowing (you know the kind of thing: “five minutes with the easy to use installer app and I was able to pick up Radio 4 through my fillings”). With a small yelp of pain I reached for the credit card.

It's worth it to get wifi in the downstairs toilet

Even in these enlightened times in which I’m allowed to identify as a woman if I want to, I confess I have never given birth, but I imagine the experience to be not unlike installing a new piece of IT. I’m sitting now in the afterglow, cradling the head of a max speed connection that appears to be travelling unimpeded through the wall of my office, forgetting the 3 hours of labour, of an “easy to use” installer app that kept saying “you have no connection” without seeming able to do anything about it. (tl;dr - the ethernet cable shouldn’t have been plugged into the socket in which one would normally plug the cable to get an internet connection. They left that bit out of the manual).

So, now that we have internet in every room, we can get on with the business of a simple country life: looking up websites to help with the Aga, looking up websites to find places to walk (I know we could just open the front door and go, but where’s the fun in that?). I wandered round the garden with a plant identifier app, taking photos of things and finding out that they were trees, or flowers. I stopped by the ten feet of stream that appears and disappears next to the fence and took a photo of a random plant bobbing over the water. I was delighted to discover it was called Water Parsnip. On a roll, I took a photo of a plant that seemed to be abundant along the banks of the stream. The app told me it was Horsebane, a rather beguiling I-live-in-the-country-now kind of name. A medicinal herb, perhaps? I read on: “Highly toxic - a single root can kill a cow.” The app lost a little of its allure.

Our new neighbour assures me the plants are all edible

For those who have been worrying about the vegetables I planted last week, feel free to fret on - they haven’t come up as yet. Mind you, the temperature has plummeted and I’m sure they’re better off hiding in the soil till it all passes. You’ll be the first to hear when I chew my first home grown rocket leaf. I just hope there’s no horsebane in the vegetable patch.