green_amber | To prove it..

V refused to believe I'd been getting up at 8.30 all through the holiday (and waking up at 7!!! ) so here's a post to prove it :-)

Back. Cornwall was wonderful - I may be in love. We were in a little self catering/B and B place near Padstow called (amusingly to me) Polmark House. It was absolutely ideal - cooked breakfast, TV, pool table and an !"honesty bar" (!!!!!! Clearly they didn't get many Scots staying :-) and otherwise you never saw anyone, and it was just like having a country house of your own, complete with maid service, unlimited parking and heated outdoor pool.

200 yards away was the best beach in the world - Harlyn Bay - jagged cliffs, rock pools, coves that got cut off by the tides, swinmy bits, surfy bits, turquoise waters and clifftop walks. Everything someone raised on Enid Blyton could possibly want. Even better when

catabolism and

estimatelad came over and we played beach tennis till I fell flat in the sand with enthusiasm. Wuff!!

andrewducker grew ever more wistful every day for the doggies on the beach - in his next life he's coming back as an Alsatian. By the end of the holiday, even I could admit that they were sort of sweet when panting with enthusiasm, or expressing extreme reluctance at their owner's projects of getting them to enjoy a nice bracing swim. I tried that one quite a bit on my own Andy doggy and it didn't work (though as I kept trying to explain, once the water's above your testicles, you might as well go the whole way in. Wuss:-)

The beach also sported one pub/shop/takeaway that turned out to do also do live music and a fantastic and cheap carvery. It all reminded me of Queensland: the sandy, easy-going surfy laidbackness of it all. (though not the wind!) I can see how Christina and Doug got converted now.

Padstow was quite staggeringly cute, if covered in tourists like a jam-pot by ants: we didn't get into a Rick Stein restaurant as per The List , but we did get fish and chips (and cod in coriander and sweet potato sauce) which may well have been better. I ate a series of amazing local ice creams (honeycomb, malteser, blackcurrant and cream, apple pie). The Eden Project , the token cultural excursion,was OK - stunning setting and i'm not sorry I went, but a bit of a letdown when you've sen real rainforest perhaps. Afterwards we headed straight for the nearest beach at Par Sands, with very very cold sea, my own personal Eden:-) I also went to a garden south of Truro (Trelissick?) after I'd dropped Andy at the airport - but only did the woodland riverside walk (to the Falmouth car ferry, Chris!) not the actual plants!!

Personal credit time: EuropCar give me the biggest hire car in the world (a Khia? when I had asked for a Golf!) and I coped, even on tiny congested roads. Magnificently in fact. I feel very competent and good about this after 20 years of driving the smallest possible cars :-)

Then I came back via Exeter and Southampton (don't ask) and visited My New House. Which is splendid beyond measure. Really, trulio. Front and back gardens and visitors welcome.

One piece of help needed: new house has no cable, so broadband wil be via phone. I have no experience of this : any recs for suppliers? Also how do I get Sky + to replace my current cable TV , and is that the best choice?

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Glad you had a brilliant time. Wouldn't mind the details of where you were staying, for future referece.

The gardens at trelissik are lovely, and my favourite bit was the wooded valley. It is featured in Rosamund Pilcher's The Shell Seakers as the site of a lovers tryste and I just had to go there having read it.

I didn't realise you were living down south now. What will you be doing?

Ooh, I must try and dig the book up.
WEll it was Polmark House, Harlyn Bay, nr Padstow! Google for them, tho the website really doesn't do it justice.
Moving to Soton Sept 8th - posts on this coming soon..

Everything someone raised on Enid Blyton could possibly want.

Including bags of tomatoes, heaps of lettuce, and simply lashings of ginger beer? ;-)

No ginger beer sighted! Unless it's a euphemism for scrumpy :-)

Zen are a good ADSL provider. And yeah, if you can't have cable then Sky+ is a good alternative. Give them a call, they'll happily sort you out (and we can go over options when I see you next).

I went with Sky when I lived in St Andrews, which at the time had no cable, nor any planned, not sure if they've finally got it now or not. When I moved to Raeding I kept Sky even though the new place had cable. My parents started to visit regularly when I moved and at the time they had NTL. Having seen what I got with Sky, they switched over to it. It might have been slightly cheaper to get all your services from cable, but the range you get with sky direct is much better.

Anyway, Sky are now also offering telephone and internet over BT lines (OK, you still have to pay the basic line rental to BT) but they are pretty competitive and I must say that I've found Sky Customer Services to be great. Certainly a far cry from the disastrous (lack of) service offered by NThelL. Note: Sky broadband isn't yet available countrywide so you'd have to check with them if it's available for your new place. Unfortunately it's not available to me yet but even though I'd decided I wanted to get broadband I'm going to leave it until after I get back from Japan (all of them seem to be minimum 12 month contracts and at this stage that's leaving me paying for a service I'm not using for 7-8 months).

To enquire with sky go to:

http://www.sky.com

I expect they will be pretty good at getting back to you.

I've heard bad things about NTL, but Telewest's customer service has always been good to me. How things work out now that they've merged is anyone's guess...

What do you get on Sky that you don't get on Cable?

The only thing you do get on cable you don't get on Sky is the Video on Demand, but if you have Sky+ then that's not such a problem.

Sky's list of channels is getting ridiculous now. I don't know what it's like on cable, but when my parents switched I was getting a much wider selection of sports, movies and documentary channels (e.g. discovery, discovery+1, discovery civilisation, discovery science, discovery wings...) The +1 channels I will admit are trumped by on-demand. Sky broadband is expected to start providing on-demand services pretty soon, though. Some of their movie channels now have associated channels allowing starts every ten or fifteen minutes, plus their interactive service is far better from what I could tell - do you get all the matches available during wimbledon on the BBC for instance. How about the BBC 3 repeat of Dr Who with the commentary soundtrack on Sunday available via interactive (you can watch with the ordinary soundtrack instead if you like)?

But I used to use the video replay to WATCH Dr WHo! (Admittedly it was pretty useless for anything else!)

The Sky broadband deal looks to be very good value, although personally I'm wary of giving money to the Murdoch tribe. ;)

[disclaimer: the company I work for makes Sky boxes, and yes, we want a huge slice of the market for broadband-enabled Sky boxes integrating TV, broadband etc, but no, I am not a Sky customer myself and am unlikely to be in the near future].

Sounds alright to me - I've never let ideology get in the way of a good deal :-)

Oooh - any sign of VoD over broadband via new boxes?

Having now checked, it seems that Sky do have more channels than Telewest - you do get a fair number of Discovery channels on Telewest, but not quite as many as you get on Sky.

Clearly digital satellite has more bandwidth available than Telewest's fibre-optic cables. Unless there's another explanation for it.

Some of it is cost and some of it is bandwidth I think. The bandwidth restrictions are different, which is why cable can offer on-demand and sky can't (lower individual bandwidth versus much greater one-to-many bandwidth). The cost side is the deals Sky does with the content companies like Discovery. Plus of course they have their own channels which they sell on to NTL/TeleWest as a much higher rate than they charge their own customers for access (Sky 1, 2, 3, Sky Movies, Sky 1 HD, Sky Movies 9/10HD...). Plus Sky have more customers so they can afford to negotiate smaller costs for carrying advert-driven channels like abc1.

That all sounds lovely, but what about the cactus? I was told that there are cacti in Cornwall. And what about the sunfish?

There probably are cacti - there certainly are palm trees. What are sunfish?!

Sunfish in Cornwall

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