I spent 52 minutes on the phone to Eurostar to cancel some tickets, for most of which I was listening to the same fifteen seconds of hold music over and over. (I timed it somewhere around the twentieth minute.)

L— has a short course in Rotterdam in a few weeks, and we’d planned to spend a long weekend there afterwards. I booked my tickets. The people responsible for booking hers spent so long not doing so that no more seats were available. All the alternatives involved expensive upgrades on what was already a pricy ticket, or changing my journey and hoping that they would sort L—’s tickets out in such a way that we could actually travel together. I learn from my experiences, so I gave up.

The £25 per leg cancellation fee isn’t too unreasonable on a £360 ticket (not flying is expensive!) and I even got my £10 worth of loyalty points back. That was an unexpected bonus, as I had written them off, but it turned out that it was the points that prevented me from cancelling online, as the point refund had to be processed manually. I also chose the worst day to phone as there was some kind of problem in France, and I probably wouldn’t have had to spend so long listening to that loop if I’d chosen any other day.

But I’m down £50, and we won’t have a weekend away.

I saw OpenReach vans in our street and the next street and went to their website to see if they’re finally implementing fibre to the premises round here. The website said “in the next year” so I entered an email address for updates. A few days later, they emailed to say it’s available.

This means that we now have a choice of upgrade from our current VDSL (fibre to the cabinet at the bottom of the street) service: Hyperoptic (available since earlier in the year), who use their own infrastructure, or any ISP using OpenReach. Either way would be cheaper than our current service. Hyperoptic offers higher speeds at a lower price, even including an extra £5 per month for a static IP address, which I need. On the other hand, I know that I’ll get a competently run service if I stick with our current provider, Andrews & Arnold, over the OpenReach infrastructure, albeit at slightly slower speeds. I don’t even really know whether Hyperoptic can live up to the promised speeds.

I haven’t decided which way to go yet.

The Metropolitan Police failed to stop hundreds of terrorists from gathering just metres away from Parliament, but through their brave actions they managed to arrest 532 of them, including some particularly dangerous individuals such as an 89-year-old woman and a blind wheelchair user.

When the bill that became the Terrorism Act 2000 was being debated, Jack Straw, the authoritarian Labour Home Secretary (some of these words are redundant: all Home Secretaries are authoritarian, regardless of party affiliation) responded to concerns about the broad scope of the legislation:

The Bill does not focus on demonstrations, which are a normal activity in a democracy. I wholly defend people’s right to go in for peaceful protest—indeed, many of my right hon. and hon. Friends and I have been involved in such peaceful protests.

Well, these were peaceful protests, and this is now a country where you can be arrested for writing four words of support on a piece of cardboard.

Here’s a fun fact: the “RAF planes” damaged by Palestine Action don’t actually seem to be RAF planes at all. They’re owned and maintained on a 27-year contract by Airtanker Limited, a private company at the bottom of a long chain of shell companies. Because of course they are, in this idiotic country where every last thing has to be farmed out to a rent-seeking private operator.

I’ve been playing a lot of banjolele. It’s such a fun instrument. The neighbours haven’t complained yet.

This week’s links: