Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Author: Geoff

A walk along The Cam

Today the Cambridge Rambling Club’s A team were having an away weekend, Neither Sally or I fancied a 10mile walk with the B team – mainly because of the agonising long lunchbreaks 🙂

So we made a quick ramble to Ely on the Fen Rivers Way  our walk of the day! It was 16 miles which we comfortably did in 5 hours at a moving pace of 3.5mph. Twas a gorgeous day with spring not to far away now – we didn’t even get our boots muddy!

Due to it been Mothering Sunday, Sally was treated to tea & scones at The Peacock in Ely, we avoided the queues by having ours outside 🙂 The scones were almost as good as The Orchard at Grantchester (slightly less fruity I thought)

The route is much improved now with only a couple of stiles  the rest been replaced with the metal kissing gates. I can really recommend it for anyone who is wanting a nice easy day out.

Oh and we now have an additional 1.7miles tagged onto the end of the walk – from Cambridge Rail station to my new abode.

Here is the Everytrail:-

Fen River Way – Cambridge to Ely

Map your trip with EveryTrail

My best investment ever!

In the big clear out prior to my move. The guy from Willingham Auctions got quite excited about taking this away:-

As you can see my vintage Davidsons Hexagonal Postcard Stand made £240 & what did I pay it for it? The answer is a big zero, I found it discarded with a load of rubbish in a skip 20 years ago!

It will be interesting to see what all the other stuff fetches next month 🙂 My suspicion is probably, at best,  less than 50% what I paid for it!

Circular walk Haverhill and Kedlington

Today the  Cambridge Rambling Club A team were out in force! 17 of us left Haverhill Sports centre to do a 15mile circular walk in brilliant sunshine but cold conditions. The hughlight was a visit to the church of St Peter and St Paul at Kedlington (No wikipedia entry) which still boasts all the original boxed in pews, which reminded me of pig pens! the larger ones of horse mangers, apparently the gallery was constructed so the serfs could be hidden from view. It also still has the hour sand glass and wig holder for the sermons.

The walk can be found on Everytrail and also Sally has a post on the walk too!:-

Haverhill to Kedlington circular walk

Map your trip with EveryTrail

Medieval Cambridge with BT #fail

I find this so hard to believe in 2010:-

“Thank you for your email dated 09/02/09 in regards to the broadband speed at your new property.
The initial test on your phone line you should be able to support a maximum broadband download speed of around 512 kbps. The actual speed you get could be lower and is dependent on several factors such as whether you have any internal home wiring, our network management policy and the number of people using the internet at the same time. Speeds are generally lower in the evening at peak times. You can find more information on all of these on BT.com.”

and where is this new property? you might ask – Well, its 1mile from the centre of Cambridge the so called heart of Europe’s Hi-Tecg Silicon Fen.

Thank goodness that Cambridge Cable (Comcast/Singapore Telecom) invested in all that fibre in 1991 (although sadly the fibre ends in the street rather than the house) so Virgin Media (who took over NTL who took over Cambridge Cable in the game of musical chairs that corporate UK loves) can offer 10MB, 20MB and 50MB speeds. Although amusingly they recommended I take on a Virgin telephone line as well because calls to their help desk would then be free!

22 Feb Update: @btcare on Twitter managed to sort it out. However, there is a £25 penalty to be paid for moving to Virgin and BT won’t let the house purchaser take over the telephone number!