What are you all up to

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Not seen a trailer, AD, but inadvertently saw a few minutes when I switched TV on one day. Twas enough for me to switch over to what I wanted in the first place.

Just knew it wouldn't be my cup of tea.

A day of wall to wall sunshine and even topped 18C. A ride up to South Shields, a hot-dog and ice cream then a ride down the coast and back home. One of those fantastic days that just happens.

The first two are South Shields, the third and fourth are the Seaburn Hotel today and during construction in 1936 (my time machine is now working btw) and the structure and houses behind it still largely there. Last one is Roker beach before heading home.

Going through my MIL's paper and found this. My daughters couldn't understand why you had to call the operator to make a call?

Actually I couldn't explain it either!

Any chance it could have either been a Reverse Charge call but only accessed through an Operator or maybe she was having a problem with a number and just needed assistance? Nice momento of times gone by though.

I never had access to a telephone in the house until I got married! Same with a car. Beginning to sound like a Monty Python sketch.😁

Ah, I remember them well!

At one time every single call had to be connected by an operator who plugged cables into the switchboard to connect the calls. Gradually the exchanges became automated with calls being recorded on a meter in the form of units rather like electricity. The meters were read by staff visiting the exchanges who physically read and wrote down the meter readings. That gave rise to the number of metered units charged on the bill after the maths was done back in the office. Later, photography was used to record the meter readings.

Each operator connected call generated a hand written ticket and the tickets were sent to a centre and somehow used to manually produce the 'trunk statements' associated with each bill. The tickets were then forwarded to the area offices around the country - millions of them!

Local calls via the operator became metered and, eventually, we had Subscriber Trunk Dialling which gave us the freedom to dial all our calls directly. It's only within the last 20 years or so that metered calls charged in units were replaced by charging by time.

Incidentally, those old bills were collated, folded, enveloped and sealed by hand.

Had a wonderful day out yesterday, took the MH over to Fife. 

Started out at Tentsmuir forest and beach, great place, can't believe we've not been before.

After lunch we headed down the coast to Crail, then on to Anstruther and finally ended up at Leven. Weather was fantastic, blue skies and quite warm only needed a T shirt.

Back to reality today and more prepping and stocking  the caravan. 

Grass cutting, front and back grass, then gave it a hoe, ground very dry. A number of bushes have been had new buds caught by frost, they will recover but now it will be a later display.

Good to hear others have trips out and still getting nice weather.

Who are Ant and Dec?

Sweltering day here today, house was way too hot when we got home.

We never watch these so called reality shows, rather we watch repeats of Morse, Lewis, Poirot, Judge John Deed etc etc.

Down at DD's today to do a few things and look after Nathan while she sorted out problems at her tenanted flat.   Not so much at her flat as problems caused by neighbouring shops who have broken into her storage room, which is nothing to do with them!  And have disposed of her stuff she stored there.   I can see this taking a long time to sort out!

OH had her second vaccination today, so we are all set to head off in June as planned

In Norway, we were well behind the phone system in UK, certainly in more remote areas.

Where I lived, in the far north of Norway, our phone number was "6" and all calls were connected by the local operator, that was in force up till the early 70s.

In 1967, after graduating, I went to work in Trondheim and could not afford a phone line, so to phone my prospective OH I had to go to the central phone exchange and order up a call to UK at great expense.  We could only afford to talk for about 5 minutes.

How times have changed!!