A call from a dinosaur (From Times Series)

A call from a dinosaur

4:17pm Tuesday 16th December 2008

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Not even my nearest and dearest would lay claim to me being a handyman or an expert in technology. I am to DIY and computers what Russell Brand is to good taste.

Which is why I sit in wonderment when I ring BT with a complaint to find myself talking to someone in a call centre in India who identifies me through me saying that I live in NW4.

When things go wrong, as they have been doing with both our telephone lines recently, BT is at great pains to explain that it costs £113, plus £97 per hour or part thereof, to get an engineer to attend.

They say we could save the expense by identifying whether the trouble is at our end or theirs, which would entail us moving a heavy desk and crawling around on the floor in various rooms checking the phone sockets and disconnecting all the equipment.

Mrs S and I decided that it wasn't worth risking us disconnecting all telephone users in NW4 . So we sent an SOS for an engineer.

On the day of the appointment, a cheery chappie rang to say that they had identified the fault on one of our lines at their end and the other would be further investigated over the next 24 hours. The next day he rang to say that this fault, too, was at their end and all was OK ... we now had a ringing tone again. No cost.

I only recount the tale because, as I write, there is again no ringing on an extension phone and I am gritting my teeth at the thought of a repeat conversation about trying to identify the problem, moving my office desk and crawling around.

The last time I did that was on the Yorkshire Moors in the dark in my training to serve King and country in the Second World War.

NW4 calling .... help!

Changing subjects, I was intrigued to read an opinion in this newspaper from a gent in New Barnet saying it is about time the Hertfordshire addresses of this borough had their own town hall ... after "more than four decades of sub-regional Government from our supposedly local town hall in Hendon, Middlesex".

I'll go with that. Let my country cousins in New Barnet have their own town hall; let me revert to living in splendid suburban isolation in Hendon, Middlesex.

Ah, nostalgia. Whatever became of Middlesex? We Hendonians were long ago stripped of our county to become a mere postal number in gargantuan London.

Middlesex County Council disappeared. Hendon Council was engulfed in Barnet.

Dear old Hendon, birthplace of aviation in this country and also the Compton brothers Denis and Leslie, now languishes in the borough of Barnet ... Barnet, of course, being a town in Hertfordshire eight miles away from Hendon.

Who recalls when the big annual air pageant was held in Hendon? I watched it in awe from a vantage point in Sunny Hill Park each year.

Back in the Seventies, when our civic worthies decided that Northgate was not the answer to a borough name, I argued that Hendon was divided from Finchley by the Dollis Brook and we proud residents didn't want to get mixed up with urban places like Chipping Barnet let alone Europe.

The only alternative name to Barnet, if I recall correctly, was Northgate, which quite correctly was despatched to the mists of time as it sounded like an entrance to a field rather than a sprawling borough of more than 300,000 people.

It's even more confusing for we football folk. Barnet FC play at Underhill stadium in Barnet Lane, Barnet, Hertfordshire, which is in the London Borough of Barnet and has a postal address to boot. They also play in the Herts Senior Cup.

Stop the world ... I want to get off.

PS When the Olympics were staged at Wembley in 1948 Hendon Council didn't get London ratepayers to contribute to the cost.

Who'll join me in a Good Old Days Society?