Stuffed, eventually

Restaurant review: The Rose Revived, Newbridge, Witney, OX29 7QD

The in-laws came down from Worcestershire today, so we toddled down to the Rose Revived for lunch.

The Rose Revived is a country pub/restaurant with accommodation. Part of the Old English Inns chain, the pub is located about halfway between Witney and Abingdon, on the banks of the river Thames.

The location is an idyllic spot for a visit; surrounded by rural countryside on the northern bank of the gently-flowing river, this must be a lovely place to sit and sip and take in the scenery on a warm evening.

But we were there, on Bank Holiday Monday, for lunch.

Our table was booked for 1.15pm and we walked in at… 1.15pm.

There were long queues at the left- and right-hand bar, but we chose wisely and were served drinks quicker than the folk in the other line.

Unfortunately, as we ordered our drinks, we were told that there was a waiting time of one hour for main-course meals.

Gulp!

I’m not sure we really considered walking out. We had, after all, booked to eat at the Rose Revived; it wasn’t as if we were opportunist drop-in punters, we wanted to be there.

By 1.25pm we had ordered (2x Lamb Shank, 1x well done Sirloin Steak, 1x Cumberland Sausage and Mash and 1x Peppered Mushroom suet pudding and mashed potato) and sat back to sip our drinks and while away an hour with conversation.

Sadly, 2.25pm came and went.

So did 3pm.

One hour and 40 minutes after ordering, our meal arrived.

At this point it’s worth noting a couple of points

• Many customers around us were loudly complaining about the amount of time it was taking to have food delivered
• Some customers negotiated a refund of their meal costs, and walked out
• The serving staff were doing their best to deal with people who become increasingly unhappy, and they were managing very well in the face of adversity

When it eventually arrived, four out of the five diners were more than happy with their food. Unfortunately, the ‘well done’ Sirloin Steak was far from being ‘well done’, as you can plainly see:

The diner who had ordered the steak declined to return the dish, in view of the hour and 40 minutes it had taken to have his meal delivered in the first place. Begrudgingly and grumblingly he put up with it.

The other four diners in our party had no such problems; plates were quickly cleared of main courses and side-orders.

There were no issues with our desserts; they were ordered, very quickly delivered and, almost as quickly dispatched.

It has to be said that the quality of all desserts and four out of five of the main courses was exemplary.

But one main course was clearly unsatisfactory, and it was not returned because of the extraordinary length of time it took to be delivered in the first place.

There is something fundamentally wrong with a kitchen when the waiting time for a main course is almost an hour and three-quarters from the time of ordering.

The Rose Revived is in a lovely spot, it’s a pleasing, well-tended, clean and comfortable venue; the serving-staff are pleasant and work hard under difficult circumstances.

But the management of the Inn need to ask themselves this one, simple question: at what point does it become acceptable to keep customers waiting over 1-1/2 hours for their main course?

Based on today’s experience, despite the gorgeous location and despite the cheerful, helpful serving staff, I am unable to advise anyone to visit the Rose Revived for a meal. In fact, based on one hour and forty minutes waiting time and a steak that was distinctly under-cooked, I can only advise people to give the Rose Revived a miss.

Random Police and Shrek Rants

Police. Sometimes I question their powers of deduction. I was reading an article in the Oxford News today, and it was about the discovery of a decapitated man in the grounds of a golf course. When the Investigating Officer was interviewed, he confirmed that the victim was dead, and said that they were treating the death as suspicious.

WTF? Of course the bloody victim was dead. He had no head! …. unless in my ignorance there are people out there who have actually recovered from that particular injury? And of course his death is suspicious!….well, unless he had the worst golf swing known to man…….. 

Anyway, that story had nothing to do with today’s post. It was just something I read whilst I was in the supermarket exchanging a faulty tube of superglue that had led to me accidentally sticking myself to a child’s teapot earlier in the week.

Back to the matter in hand. After Izzy’s school holiday jaunts, she was back in Oxford and I was excited about having her for four straight days before she set off on another holiday. I had made sure that all my house chores were done so that we could concentrate on having fun. Yeh, you got it …….. I’m the bloody double of Mary Poppins I am.

I had it all planned. We were going to be doing loads of ‘outdoors stuff’ because I am a Victorian parent in that I believe that television is evil and if a child watches it too much, when they get older they will do horrible things involving fireworks and animals. The television rule doesn’t apply to me, obviously. I don’t know what I would do without my daily dose of ‘Big Brother’.

So along came Day 1 of our funfest. I opened the curtains and to my chagrin, it was raining. Damn! Actually, it wasn’t just raining, it was totally pissing it down. As I peered through a hole in the condensation on the window, I could see Naughty George in the garden having a wee whilst the rain bounced off his head. 

It became instantly apparent that my strict outdoors regime had been washed out, and that I needed to come up with a contingency, and quickly.

I jumped onto my computer and typed; “what the bloody hell can I do with a five year old if it’s raining outside?” Amazingly, Google came back with an answer, but I didn’t like it; “Shrek Forever After at Witney Cineworld.“

Ugh the cinema. I hate the cinema. But Izzy had already seen the picture of Shrek on my screen and had started jumping up and down and nearly spewing with excitement; “Can we go and see that mummy? Purlleeeeaase?”

I sighed……. and reluctantly agreed. Jeez, I’m a total pushover.

Two hours later, we arrived at Witney’s Cineworld, and it wasn’t long before all the things that I abhor about cinemas were pushed into my face. Firstly, there was the queue for tickets. For some bizarre reason, they were only selling tickets at the food counter (seems to be a new trend), so we had to stand in line for TWENTY minutes, watching people buy hot-dogs and popcorn, when all we wanted were the bloody tickets.

Then I had to actually pay for the tickets, and it cost £17.00 ($26.00 USD) …. oh yeh. For that price I could have bought the Shrek DVD and a DVD player to play it on.

So there I was, grumbling and swearing and cursing about the crap customer service at cinemas, but even I have to admit (begrudingly); Izzy abso-bloody-lutely loved it. It was all 3D, so things kept coming out of the screen making her laugh her head off. And I suppose that the film’s storyline was moderately entertaining.

But! And I say, BUT! Surely cinemas cannot survive in the long term with their current levels of customer service and price structure? Is it me?

A day trip

Today I went to London. Just to see if it was real. I took a HUGE bag of Sandwich Spread sandwiches. Unfortunately the sandwiches were mostly gone by the time I got there. How did that happen? I wish I knew. Really. But it seems to happen almost every time I take home-made sandwiches with me. Bizarre. Anyway. It was an enjoyable trip; I do like the broadband WiFi on the journey.

Starbucks have taken the process of buying coffee, ripped the heart and soul out of the experience, burned the mortal remains until there is almost nothing left, liquidised the ashes in to a smoothie, fed the drink to a 23-year-old, lame, partially-sighted mule and then shot the mule. Twice. This afternoon I went in to a branch of Starbucks. The length of the queue should have put me off, but no, I stood in line with all the other lemons. As I slowly shuffled forwards, like a cold-war Babushka gradually taking root in a queue for half a loaf of mouldy bread in a Moscow bakers, I could hear the rat-a-tat interrogation of the guy behind the counter. All I wanted was a coffee. With every passing second, my desire to be *there*, in that queue, surrounded by tourists waiting for the inevitable ‘grande non-fat ice white mocha no whip rikki-tikki-tavi fellatio cunnilingus MOT-fail welding heinz 57 with extra giraffe and a side helping of kangaroo and brick catfood‘ interrogation at the cash till; my need to be *there* just unwrapped like the peel off an apple, and dropped away until all I had left was the word ‘coffee’. I turned and walked out.

Twitter is currently enduring my one-word-a-thon #twitterporn. I feel a bit sorry for it.

Chocolate is about to be taken, and accompanied by a mug of hot tea. Oh yes!

Wasted on the young?

Thanks (entirely, I am sure) to the outside-but-internal assistance of Daniel, our broadband problems seem to have gone away. If it wasn’t for his help, I feel we would never have penetrated BT down to the technical level necessary to investigate and fix the issue. As of this morning we have a massive 6.9 Mbs. Thanks Daniel.

So now I need to find something else to moan talk about.

I could moan talk about a chronic piece of insomnia that hit me in the early hours of yesterday morning, but what would be the point of that?

Besides, I was productive whilst I was awake; I wrote an album review which even now, in the light of Monday morning, doesn’t look too shabby.

I also had the urge to get out my acoustic guitar and have another go at killing Radiohead’s ‘Karma Police’ to death, but I didn’t think Sophie would appreciate the 3.30am musical session. So I resisted.

Gemma came around in the afternoon, which was nice; we drove in to Huffkins in Witney, drank Latte and ate lunch.

Those who listen to our podcast will know Gemma as our occasional co-presenter, the slightly dippy mentalist, ‘Pigeon Girl’.

While Gem took a few hours to buy some loo roll, Soph and I went to see Knight and Day which was, you know, OK. If you leave your brain at home.

Afterwards, when all three of us were walking back to the car, Gemma told us how she passed the time; reading, mostly. And being annoyed by people. She’s so much like Sophie and me in a number of ways…

When we got back home a small garden spider scuttled over the doorstep. Gemma shrieked, ‘Is that a scorpion?’

I was put on immediate ‘Spider/scorpion Repatriation Duty’ and eventually corralled the wee timorous beastie underneath the dining-table, before shoving the poor little creature out in to the garden.

Poor bugger, it probably only came in to use the bog. Or steal some of Gemma’s freshly-acquired loo roll.

You know how people get their eyes lasered to improve their sight? Well I’m thinking of getting my brain lasered, because as sure as eggs is eggshaped there’s something not quite right in my head, because I keep having random but in-depth thoughts like…

We know that university places in the UK have been restricted on a gradually diminishing curve – and that this year there has been a greater restriction on university places than that curve could have predicted.

We also know that there’s been a significant increase in the number of school-pupils who have attained the highest possible marks in their ‘A-levels’ on an almost corresponding, increasing curve.

But what is the source of the secret intelligence briefing that seems to have been beamed directly in to the heads of the 40,000 pupils, who are amongst the 48,500 who failed to get a university place; the 40,000 pupils who have declared that they are backing away from education for (and I quote one such former pupil in Saturday’s Guardian) ‘a bit of an enforced gap year’?

Seriously?

I was having a conversation with such a student a few days ago. I know her very well, she’s not dim by any stretch of the imagination; obviously disappointed at not getting anything on her preference list, and having no luck with clearing, she has decided on taking a last-minute gap year. She’s convinced she’ll get ‘in’ next year.

Oh. Not dim, but lacking a degree of foresight! Logic tells me that next year it will be significantly more difficult to find university places.

I wonder about these 40,000 students who are, if the reports are correct, opting for an unplanned gap year.

Do these people imagine that this year’s difficulty will just go away, in some Scooby-Doo, wavy-line kind of way, in just twelve months? Have they not considered the all-too-likely possibility that if they couldn’t get the places they wanted when competing against this year’s crop of school-leavers, then the competition for places next year, when the exit grades are likely to reach yet another ‘all time high’, is likely to be incrementally more severe?

Certainly, all my reading on this so far, would seem to indicate that none, or almost none, of these unplanned ‘gap-yearers’ have considered the massive scope of the probable log-jam likely to occur next year. Almost none of them seem to be considering what they might do now, to mitigate against an even more competitive placement environment, which, in twelve months time, will be struggling to copy with even more ‘A-Level’ passes of even higher standards.

I’m not having a winge about students, as such. I’m just taking in to account the mass of scholastic, academic and economic evidence that is in the public domain, looking at the cycles that have established themselves over the last ten years, adding just a smidge of common sense and extending that to the next twelve months.

Really, I don’t see an improvement. The admission models of the UK’s established universities – not just those in the Russell Group – are based on certain constants, with marginal allowance for key variables.

The problem is that within the last five years almost every factor in the admission model has become a variable. Variable funding, variable research grants, variable application numbers, variable ‘A-level’ results, etc, ad nauseam.

One of my clients is NERC, and their funding has been cut back significantly. this has a direct effect on universities, because NERC is the funding clearing centre for environmental science.

Within the last six months, identically restricted situations have come to exist in BBSRC, EPSRC and ESRC.

It seems logical that without an increased funding variable at the other end of the student pipeline, the amount of traffic (students) that goes in to the pipeline has to be harshly culled.

I suggested, to the disappointed student, that she opted for a 12-month course at a nearby college, ideally studying a subject with an identifiable relationship to her degree choice. Or failing that, I suggested, spent the year on an arts/media course – to throw herself in to a new subject.

She met both suggestions with indifference; the choices, in her head, are her chosen subject at her chosen universities or a gap year.

I hope that, in twelve months time, she won’t be bitterly disappointed. But the evidence tells me that she’ll be one of, potentially, 80,000 candidates who will be surplus to requirements.

Sad.

Getting fucked by BT Broadband

It seems that we have somehow subscribed to BTs reduced hours tariff.

Our broadband came back online at 9.22 this morning.

And took itself offline at 4.51 this evening.

Fucking amazing.

update 8.12pm
Due to amazing help from an amazingly helpful person (Daniel!), we are back online.

Thanks, guy. Because of your helpful intervention I was able to make a scheduled phone-call to a musician in a coffee-bar in Lafayette, Louisiana. How cool is that?

Fucking BT Broadband

Warning! There may possibly be a stray sweary turn of phrase hereabouts

So BT.

What a complete and utter bunch of cunts.

We have no fucking broadband.

Again.

More in due course.

Good old BT (the latest update)

So, to recap, we have been experiencing on-going problems with our BT Vision box.

Daily rebooting, to make the thing work; dropped menus; dropped (paid for!) on-demand programmes; refusing to record.

Generally being an obstructive and uncooperative piece of technology.

Unlike the BT’s offshore Helpdesk, who are obstructive and uncooperative humans.

But fortunately, we have been rescued from the unhelpful clutches of the aforementioned Helldesk by the staff of BTCare.

Thanks to BTCare’s intervention, we have been able to talk to the BT Vision resolution team, and as a direct result of that we are having a new BT Vision box delivered on Saturday morning.

But how awful is BT’s offshore Helpdesk?

Really awful, obv. Awful to the point where we would rather put up with a failing service than go through the pain of calling them.

Anyway, that’s an issue pending resolution.

The other issue has been our hideously slow broadband speed, as experienced the other night.

This has, we’ve been told, been put down to ‘technical issues’ with BT’s equipment in the local exchange.

So there we are. That’s the end of these problems.

Hopefully.

Good old BT (this morning’s version)

I was struggling to download a package that I have to edit – struggling, because my download speed was around the same levels as last night’s downgraded performance – when suddenly my download speed zoomed through the roof.

Is it funny that this miraculous speed improvement occurred just a few minutes before 8.30am?

Is it also funny that last night’s speed dive occurred in the early evening?

Am I being paranoid to suppose that someone, somewhere in BT’s domain ‘did something’ last night, and then went home? And someone else came in this morning and corrected the ‘something’ to put things back on track?

Because how else could you explain the sudden downgrade in performance last night, and the equally sudden upgrade in performance this morning?

Here’s the screenshot of what I’m now getting:

And this morning's 'up to 10Mb broadband speed is…'

Good old BT

I haven’t really chronicled my current battle with BT yet. I’ll just say that my first phone call with BT’s overseas call centre actually had me on the verge of tears when the person on the other end disputed my statement to the point of almost – but not quite – calling me a liar.

Even though I had a voicemail from BT Vision’s technical resolution team to confirm what I was trying to tell him.

There’s far too much meat on all of this. I think it could be time to export all of my BT-related posts in to one purpose-built website.

Anyway, tonight.

I tried to use Twitter.

I tried to read email.

I tried to watch a video on YouTube.

I tried to look up Owen’s competition results.

I tried to send young Jess a Facebook thing.

All of these attempts failed. So I ran a speedcheck. Read it and weep girls, read it and weep:

And tonight's 'up to 10Mb broadband speed is…'

Sunday morning in the Big Brother house

Sophie has just gone back to bed with a cup of tea. She’s now reading.

Bren is downstairs. He has just backed up many websites and internet databases. He’s now sipping his tea and wondering if he should call BT Vision’s helldesk.

Actually, it’s surprisingly difficult to keep everything in the third person.

Hello people! How are you all this fine and sunny grey and overcast Sunday morning?

I’ve updated the theme; what do you think? A little too fiery? A touch too dark? A bit too much ‘apocalypse nowish’?

Oh well.

Suck it and see. As the actress said to the Bishop.

I have just finished checking that the many websites and databases that I host for a variety of nice people have been correctly backed up and stored.

They have.

I am sipping a fantastic cup of tea made by the lovely Soph (who, even now at 9.35am, is Back In Bed Reading A Good Book), whilst I wonder whether I should trouble BT Vision’s helldesk to tell them about their product not working much.

It’s a busy day for a Sunday.

We have to produce a concept demo of a new show for a radio station. That’s all I can tell you about that for now.

I have a 2pm meeting in Oxford with an independent record label.

And this evening we are going to an Over 18s showing of Toy Story 3 – again, in Oxford.

There won’t be any porn or live sex, it’s not that kind of over 18s thing. It just means there won’t be any little darlings being intrusive all over the place.

And Twitter is currently down for maintenance.

Breakfast is definitely going to happen next. And maybe another cup of tea.

Ear, there’s a thing. Why do I say ‘cup of tea’ when I mean ‘mug of tea’?

Am I subconsciously displaying some kind of posh pretension,  by substituting the word ‘mug’ for the more middle-class ‘cup’?

I hope not!

I am to pretensions of posh what Ghengis Khan was to Emily Post’s notion of etiquette.

Here’s an interesting fact:

In the same year that General Custer was getting his barnet refashioned, in a very rudimentary style, at Little Big Horn, Tivadar Puskás was designing the first telephone exchange for Thomas Edison.

Amazing, isn’t it?

I mean, if George and the Native Americans could have held on to their differences for a little bit longer, they could have sorted things out over a conference call.

Right, my tummy is talking to me. Food is required.

Time passes…

Breakfast has been consumed, tea is being drunked, washing is ‘on’ and Soph is Back In Bed.

And I am on the phone to BT Vision.

Well, when I say I am ‘on the phone to BT Vision’, I mean I am in a queue – in to which a recorded announcement breaks, every not and then, to say thank you for holding and to say how busy they are and how wonderful I am but never the two shall meet.

Or something like that.

More time passes…

I am still in the queue. The same lady keeps breaking in to tell me my call will be answered as soon as possible.

I have been in this queue for ten minutes, so far.

There’s some Israeli apologist on the television who is trying to make the point that The World Is Too Critical Of Israel.

Disappointingly, no-one on the panel has thought to bring up the peculiarly-overlooked murder of civilians – in international waters – on ships bearing aid. What short memories some people have.

Meanwhile, I am still in the BT Vision queue. The lady tells me that my call Will Be Answered As Soon As Possible.

It has been seventeen minutes so far.

Time passes some more…

I am speaking to someone!

I have given him the long list of problems that have affected our BT Vision box over the last week.

And he appears not to understand.

He has gone off-line to perform some line diagnostics.

Why? The problem clearly is hardware related and nothing to do with the line. The shopping-list of problems should have told him this.

I shall wait some more, but at least this time I have Eine Kliene Nacht Musik coming down the line at me.

Time passes just a little more…

The guy came back to tell me that we have a broadband speed issue which is affecting our BT Vision service.

While he’s telling me this, I run a quick broadband speed-check which gives my current download speed as:

Broadband speed check results

Frankly, I find it very confusing to be told that 7.01/Mbs is an insufficient broadband speed to support BT Vision.

And yes, we are actually having one of the common issues with our BT Vision box, as I’m on the phone to the guy, so this is real-time reporting on a real-time problem.

Anyway, after 34 minutes, the call ends in an ‘inconclusive but promising’ fashion. The guy at the BT Vision helldesk has said he will forward our problem on to their 2nd line support/technical team; they will contact me within 24 hours.

Now then, what shall I do next?