On one of my frequent walks around the village I recently spotted a stack of generators outside our church.  They were rather large although not too noisy, and were humming away at the side of the church out of sight of parishioners arriving at the front.   Also the hands of the clock in the bell tower were showing not the poetical ten to three, but ten minutes past one instead.  It was half past eight.

I assumed there must be some kind of problem with the electrics inside the medieval church, and I asked one of the good poppy-knitters about the generators as she came towards me down the main street this morning.  She trilled how wonderful it was now to have a faster broadband and be able to obtain a good signal on her mobile phone without having to hang out of her bedroom window.

I must have looked rather puzzled at her reply, as she went on to explain that there was now a mast installed out of sight inside the bell tower which ran off the generators, which not only improved villagers’ broadbands and phone signals, but also augmented the church’s finances into the bargain.  Hmm …who knew the church was so cash-strapped?

I had previously not had any problem with broadband or with phone signals, but recently, since the generators had been installed, have often had to put up with an interrupted broadband instead.  Several times every day our Internet crashes, although it seems that speaking to Mrs Poppy Knitter, her broadband is now faster than ever.

Another hmm… do I want a radiation-emitting mast within a short distance of my home?  I’ve already fought my cancer battle, and do not fancy going through it all again.  Sad to say it appears that the mast is here to stay, whether we like it or not.

Oh… and the church clock?  Mrs PK said that ‘somebody had serviced the clock and now it doesn’t work at all’!  Only in Suffolk…