The saga with Orange goes on. Having suffered several periods when we couldn't get online for days on end we decided we had to switch providers. We did so with trepidation, knowing that it just couldn't be straightforward.

It wasn't.

Orange took weeks to send an e-mail telling us what our migration code was. We gave it to BT, received our BT boradband kit and waited for the great day when we could finally switch. Except we couldn't.

BT said Orange's migration code was wrong. We'd have to get another one from orange. Also, Orange hadn't cleared the line. Orange said they couldn't give a new code, and in any case their migration codes don't work with BT.

BT wasn't keen to comment on that, but insisted that Orange must clear the line.

Orange said BT had to send someone to the exchange to do that manually. BT listened in silence.

And then, with no BT service in operation, Orange cut us off.

So now we have no ISP, hence a month of no posts from me.

Who does the humble consumer believe in all this?

We've been back to Orange, who now say they'll clear the line in 10 days. BT say that even though Orange has cut us off they can't do anything to help.

When I ask again they say, well, we can send a disk that will give you a narrow band connecion. The disk, when it comes, seems to be for renewing broadband drivers. I load it but can't begin to understand the instructions it gives me.

BT say we could also complain to Ofcom. Easier said than done. Ofcom give you a sort of diagnostic Q and A and then tell you to ring BT wholesale. But BT has already said it can't help for another 10 days.

So, we ought to have our line cleared on January 3, and we might get connected to BT five days from then.

Meantime, no ISP, no help and no idea who is telling the truth. And yet, I am online. I've done it by finding a wireless broadband service that covers my area. I've no idea whose it is, or whether I'm breaking every online law in using it. But it works.

Could this be the future - will we one day have no need of Orange, BT and all the other useless providers of no service whatsoever?

That would be nice. And cheaper.

What a scandal: sacks of chestnuts put out with the rubbish in a suburban street.

My kids were horrified when I picked one out of a bin-liner, pushed back its spiky green jacket with gloved hands, then bit and peeled its glossy brown skin to get at the white crunchy flesh - like a nutty Wensleydale, deliciously cold, bitter and milky

I couldn’t rescue them all, but I did stuff my pockets. I mean, does nobody around here know that this is a waste of very good food?

I once read A place in Italy by Eric Newby, in which he buys a farm surrounded by chestnut woods and that still has a chestnut-roasting outhouse. Dried, they make a flour - for pasta and gnocchi - that in poorer times was the staple diet in the area.

I had more modest goals for my rescued harvest: a chestnut terrine and a chestnut pasta sauce with ham and cheese, from recipes in a book that had been sitting on the shelf just waiting for the raw ingredients to become available.*

First, cook your chestnuts. I chose to boil rather than roast them, which involved cutting them in half and popping in bubbling water for 15 minutes. Then you have to take them out of their skins. Use a spoon, says the book. That doesn’t work. Some crumble, others leave half their flesh behind. So I start peeling with my thumbnail. Pop them in ice water, says the book, then the bitter, brown inner-skin will come off. Yeah, easier said than done.

And quite a lot are bad. It takes me about an hour to go from 2kg of nuts in shells to 600g of cooked flesh ready for liquidising. I add some of the cooking water, which is chestnut-brown like something you’d use to paint the shed. Slowly the dry mess turns into a slick puree. I add it to onions and finely sliced mushrooms fried earlier; then spoon the mixture into a loaf tin. After chilling in the fridge I turn it over and out pops a perfect brick of terrine. It’s delicious: moist, creamy, earthy and nutty.

I save some of the chestnuts until later in the week, for the pasta sauce. It is divine. To a base of fried diced onions you add the quartered chestnuts plus chopped ham, yoghurt, parsley and grated cheese.

Every so often I day-dream about the house-with-land that we’ll move to one day. It has a growing list of essentials: a mulberry tree, a quince; room for a modest orchard of apple, pear, plum and cherry. But now I find there is another absolute must-have: a chestnut wood.

*On Chestnuts by Ria Loobhuizen (Prospect Books)

Not that I hate anybody, really, but I've come close this week. I haven't had an internet connection since Monday, and the one I have now sparked into life for 10 minutes this morning but was then dead until half an hour ago.

This is the second major breakdown in three months. Could it have anything to do with them offering free broadband to Orange phone users? I’ve had long conversations with very polite young gentlemen in India, who read from a script and cannot diverge from it.

The conversation, down a waivery line, goes like this:

“Hello my name is Raj and how can I help you today?”

“Hi, my Orange broadband isn’t working, I cant get online.

“Ok what you are telling me is your Orange broadband is not working and you cannot get online. “

“Yes”

“Let me just confirm sir with you that the problem that you are facing today is that your Orange broadband is not working and you cannot get online.

“Yes, like I said”

“Ok, and is there anything else I can help you with today.”

“No, Id just like you to get me online.”

This script that poor old Raj has to follow takes about 30 minutes to get through, and its clearly pointless after the first time because you know that there is a problem with Orange and they cant get you the web access you need. But they still make you unplug everything, check everything, replug it, enter passwords and user names (which they know but I really don’t, so clearly any of them could romp around under my login if they ever felt like it

So, for the third – or is it the fourth time - I’ve unplugged, rebooted, re-entered passwords, and done all they asked me to, knowing – after the first couple of attempts – that this was all fruitless. In the end they always tell you there is a problem with your exchange.

So, on to BT.

Is there a problem with my exchange? They check the line. No problem at all, infact, I’m close to an exchange and should have a fantastic connection.

Last time I said to Raj, or his brother, that this wasn’t true, that the problem was with Orange. He repeated: “No sir what I am telling you is there is a fault at your exchange.

I told him that I knew he had to stick to a script but we both knew that wasn’t true. Raj remained diplomatically silent.

He said they would do a long check on my line – they’d done a short check (meaningless jargon) and if I could phone back after two hours to check.

Could they phone me? No sir they could not phone me. When I try to phone back there is a message saying they know lots of us are having problems and that they are working “right this minute” to sort things out. But next morning there is still no connection. This time after Raj’s cousin has gone through the pantomime with me, they say ring back if it’s not working in two days. And then, miraculously, tonight I get a connection.

But it’s too late. I’ve called BT and will switch to them just as soon as Orange cough up a migration code. Which could take 10 days.

Now they’ve lost me they just don’t care - don't care about the money I’ve lost, the business that I can’t operate.

So, yes, I really do hate my ISP. Don’t we all? Anyone got any idea what I can do about it? How can I get back from them the thousands of pounds in lost business that their repeated failures have cost me?

The future’s bright, but it’s not Orange

The mulberry gin is made. During the week we took a cheapo day trip to France for gin at Euros7 for 1.5 litres. As ever, finding a recipe was the difficult bit. The mulberries have been sitting patiently in the fridge since I picked them from our tree in August; so full of rich juice that they don’t seem to freeze exactly, more turn to frosted rubies in their bags.

Last time I made it I found a recipe for sloe gin on the net, and adapted it by reducing the sugar – reasoning that mulberries are a whole lot sweeter than sloes.

This time I found a recipe someone had posted for raspberry gin. That recommended using equal weights of fruit and sugar – a pound of each to every bottle of gin. That seemed to me to be two sweet by far, so I’ve halved the sugar. I mixed four bottles of gin with four pounds of fruit and two pounds of sugar, which filled a gallon demijohn perfectly.

So now the demijohn of soon-to-be mulberry gin sits on the piano. Last night, freshly made, there was a layer of undisolved sugar like a sandy sea-bed, but this morning its down from an inch thick to a centimetre, so things seem to be working.

The trip to France was so painless we kept asking ourselves why we don’t do this four times a year. First thing in the morning the Eurotunnel terminal was deserted. We stuck a credit card in the slot of an unmanned kiosk and we were through – no passport checks, no customs, just straight on to a train and away in about three minutes.

What a good job we weren’t terrorists. There were checks on the way back, so maybe the passage of undesirables is one-way only.

The thing about France is that even the bog-standard supermarket we ambled down to on the outskirts of Boulogne was head and shoulders above anything in Britain. And just about everything is at least a third cheaper than here – wine half the price or less. So why is Tesco so smug? A Leclerq or an Auchan would clean up in London.

Everything looks so much nicer too – fantastic displays of fish and great bags of mussels and king prawns. The miles of cheese you expect, but even the ordinary veg looks lovely. Leeks cleaned and tied in red ribbon then wrapped in cellophane. The nets of garlic give you 10 bulbs for little more than £1, and they can be £1 each in London.

As we had so much I’ve planted the cloves from three bulbs in the garden. I gave up on garlic last year because it just didn’t grow terribly well, but I’m giving it one last try. If you can grow it, it’s wonderful: fresher and stronger tasting than the shop-bought stuff, and it lasts for months without sprouting. I’ve just had to throw away bulbs bought in Waitrose only a couple of weeks ago.

Watch out UK supermarkets, you aren’t nearly as good as you think you are.

The freezer came into its own in another way this week. The garden tomatoes – wonderful sweet Lilliput that we had a glut of throughout August and September – also have a shelf to themselves, and I thought it was about time we used some incase they deteriorate. So a big bag went into a ratatouille, together with red peppers and aubergines from our France trip.

Bearing in mind I just froze them whole – no blanching, no peeling or turning to passata - I wasn’t sure how they’d taste. Infact they were as sweet and sharp and fresh as if they had just been picked.

The other great thing about France is you can turn up, as we did, in the old city of Boulogne – or indeed anywhere else – wander around and find a simple, cheap restaurant full of locals and get a four course lunch for Euros15.

It was Toussaint, All Saints Day, and as the city’s cathedral was across the road we went in after lunch and lit a candle.

And we are still feasting on the food we brought back. Last night we had Toulouse sausage with the ratatouille, the night before moule frit, today it’ll be pasta carbonnara with some of the ham and cheese. And then, maybe a prawn frittata tomorrow, or a casserole with some of the other sausage and a salami.

And still the mulberry gin to look forward to. It’ll be drunk at Christmas – and so will I.

I did a Saturday morning job in Wandsworth. There were 10 window boxes on three floors of a great big house, so I got to the Homebase across the bridge when it opened and filled the van with bedding plants - purple, silver and yellow. The final effect was pretty good but it was a heck of an ordeal carrying it out. Every window had to have furniture moved away from it, and window locks removed. I had to lug buckets of fresh compost around, trying not to knock the antiques. Each window box had to have the old plants and soil removed and new compost shoveled in before I could plant. It was almost impossible not to make a mess. I had to stand in the bath to do the bathroom windowsill, moving a forest of Jo Malone bottles first.

Then it all had to be watered.

I thought it was all done and was about to go, then saw to my horror that the white-painted front of the house was streaked with black soil that had been leeched out of the containers by my watering. I had to clamber around leaning out of windows with a cloth wiping the house down before they noticed.

They seemed happy enough, and asked if I’d like a Maison Blanc cake to take away with me. It looked fantastic – a chocolate work of art – and I accepted gratefully. As I left the woman said: “I’m glad you can use the cake, it’s yesterdays so we can’t risk it on the children.”

Later she phoned up to complain - about soil in the bath. I told her she’d poisoned me with a cake. I don’t think they’re going to become regular customers.

Saturday was a day that somehow got left off summer and found itself slipped into a batch of cold-and-wet late-autumn ones. It was warm and bright, and I celebrated by snoozing in the hammock for what surely must be the last time this year, and picking the last of the tomatoes before pulling up the now-withered plants and putting them in the compost.

We even had lunch outside, polishing off a dish of Kentish cob nuts my sister gave us from her tree in – you guessed it – Kent. They are wonderful – milky, slightly sweet and crunchy. I looked in the Nigel Slater cookbook (Kitchen Diaries – the best cook book I have) and found a recipe for Cob Nut Salad, which involved chopping them into a bowl, adding finely sliced celery and crumbling cheese over them. He recommends Ticklemore, but the Wensleydale we had to hand worked well.

The bare black earth where the tomatoes stood looks like an opportunity. I will try my own garlic again. I’ve had one success and three pretty miserable failures from garlic. One year it rotted, another the squirrels took every clove but not, as I later discovered, to eat. They redistributed them all around the garden, giving me garlic in the most unlikely and inappropriate places.

I know my soil is too heavy really, but my one successful year urges me to try again – that and the fact that even Waitrose’s Truly Bloody Expensive brand of garlic sprouts within a week or two of purchase. My own garlic lasted a year without sprouting, which suggests that the stuff we buy in the shops is already in late middle age.

I took a stroll round the farmer’s market after lunch, noting with satisfaction that my free cob nuts cost £3.80 a kilo there.

It’s one of the joys of the market as the season progresses – to check how much my own produce would cost if I had to buy it. To see, for example, that my artichokes – of which I had gathered 15 that morning - were £1.20 each, and that tomatoes on the vine were £5 for a measly punnet. I must have £100 worth in my freezer – and that’s just the ones that even with all my ingenuity and greediness I haven’t yet been able to use, but which I can thaw to a deliciously fresh tomato sauce right into winter.

The farmers’ markets take us Londoners for mugs. We were buying meat one day, and when we asked the rosy hued yokel selling us the brisket how we should cook it he said: “Don’t ask me. I eat in the pub.”

It’s time to tackle the quince mountain. The box of fruit I picked at the weekend will deteriorate if I don’t use it fast, and there is still half the tree to pick. I must have 10 lbs of fruit, and there are 20 lb more to come. I’m leaving the rest on the tree, taking advantage for as long as I can of nature’s life support system. If I pick them they lose their scent, their bloom, and grey pin pricks appear on the skin that translate into brown flecks when you cut into the flesh.

So, with the rain bucketing down this morning and gardens impossible to work in, I set to. I have some tried and tested recipes – quince and orange marmalade and quince and lemon marmalade. These are delicious; with the rosy red of the fruit once cooked and the tang of the citrus peel they have a real zing.

I have put off doing quince cheese, because I’ll be stirring for the rest of the day. Quince cheese has nothing to do with cheese but is very good with it. You make it like jam but then keep on cooking and stirring until you have a mix the consistency of toffee, and a deep red. Poured into deep trays it sets into a beautiful jelly that you slice into thin, translucent slivers of concentrated fruit.

But I needed some new recipes. And the recipe books failed me. That’s the problem with quince – and even more with mulberry, our other home-grown big crop. So few people have the trees or use the fruit that the cookery books pretty much ignore them.

I had found on Google some while ago an Australian university site with personal recipes. Someone called Jennifer Quince had one for quince and tomato relish, and someone else for ginger and quince butter. So that’s what I made this morning. I used three pounds of fruit on each. I’d give you the full url but the page seems to have disappeared. It starts http://cres.anu.edu.au but when I went there and tried to search for Quince I was denied access. The relish is delicious, it will be great on burgers and sausages, the ginger butter I’m undecided upon. The ginger works well but it has a pale sickly colour because you don’t cook it long enough to turn the fruit red.
Anyway, here are the recipes. (I reduced the amounts)

GINGER QUINCE BUTTER (for toast, pancakes, etc.)
Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2001 11:52:59 -0800
From: peggy morrison
3 pounds ripe quince (5 or 6 fruit), peeled, cored, sliced to make 8 cups
1 1/2 C. water
1 C . apple juice
3 T. lemon juice
Bring to a boil, then simmer, partially covered, about 30 minutes or until tender. Stir in the rest of the ingredients:
1/2 C. sugar
1/2 C. honey
1 T. grated lemon peel
1 T. chopped fresh ginger root (or 1/2 tsp. ground ginger)
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. grated nutmeg
Cook, stirring, another 5 minutes. Puree in blender (or in food processor with a metal blade). Cool, then put into freezer or refrigerator containers and cover tightly. Can keep frozen up to 3 months. Makes about 5 cups.

Quince and tomato relish
My name is Jennifer QUINCE. I have a delicious recipe for quince and tomato relish peel and slice 4kg ripe tomatoes 3kg diced onions 5kg peeled quinces place in a large dish sprinkle with 2 tablespoons of salt and let stand overnight [I ignored this in my impatience to get on, and it didn’t seem to affect the finished product] then empty into large pot bring to the boil and add 3kgs of sugar and 2 x 250ml cups of vinegar stir until sugar is melted than add 4tbsp of dry mustard 4tbsp of curry powder boil gently for approx 2 1/2 hours stirring often than add 1 cup of plain flour stirring for approx 15 mins until thick I hope you enjoy your relish!

That solves the problem with most of the picked fruit, but I may have to delve deeper for ideas to use up the rest. The same site has a recipe for quince hand cream. Now there’s a thought

We’re under a lot of pressure to get another cat. Partly it’s the children, but also the garden needs one. We found a mouse nest under the back of the house in the summer, and yesterday a couple of squirrels chased each other into the house. Luckily I was on hand to shut the door from the garden room to the kitchen to stop them tearing round the other rooms and up and down the curtains. One fled straight out of the back door, but the other hurled itself at the glass of the full-length windows for a couple of minutes before, concussed, it found the way out.

I’ve had my strawberries, apples and tomatoes eaten, and last week a pair of fat pigeons started on the rocket. I thought they were after the cabbage at first but oh no, your pigeon of today turns its beak up at basic English veg – only something continental and expensive will satisfy them.

None of these pests would have troubled us in Luigi’s day.

Luigi was an Italian cat, as his name suggests – owned by my Italian brother-in-law until he married my wife’s sister and she said the cat had to go. The children were little at the time, and we hit upon the idea that the cat only understood Italian as a way of trying to get them to start speaking the language. They would stand at the back door with his food bowl, calling: “Luigi, manga.” and “papa Luigi, papa.”

Rarely would be come. Luigi was an outdoor cat. Indoors he became nervous. A closed door blocking his exit to the garden would have him mewing piteously. Outdoors was his domain. He prowled the back garden like a small, slightly bowlegged tabby tiger with a tatty ear, never venturing beyond the triangle of territory enclosed by the houses in our immediate neighbourhood.

Except when it was very cold, he preferred to sleep beneath a bush rather than in his basket. Even the heaviest rain could not drive him indoors.

He was ferociously defensive of his territory. Squirrels soon learned they had to keep to the very treetops. Birds, that they would lose their eggs, their young and their lives unless they were very careful.

Other cats should expect a fight as the price of a short cut across our lawn. With foxes, Luigi was more circumspect. He’d watch them, standing his ground, while they sniffed at him, agreeing a truce.

When I gardened, he was my constant companion. No sooner had I taken a fork or hoe from the shed than he’d come over the wall, content to sit at my side as I laboured. Maybe there was a streak of Robin in his mongrel blood.

But then he died. A sudden loss of weight and a dulling of his glossy coat told us something was amiss. He stopped making even his brief visits indoors for food. The vet told us his kidneys had given out on him. His last meal was of ham – his favourite – taken from my hand, and a drink from the pond which, for Luigi, had always held the sweetest water.

With Luigi’s passing, the ecology of our small plot altered radically. The squirrels, once the most fleeting of visitors, now played chase across the lawn and up and down the mulberry tree. The expressway of mingling branches that had once sped them overhead was now used to deliver them to a feast that had always been denied them. They found our redcurrants greatly to their taste. The heads of our sunflowers would be torn off and eaten like big fat burgers. We learned early on that we would never enjoy a crop of nuts from our new hazel. Even the cucumbers would suffer an exploratory bite which left them limp and weeping on the vine.

We acquired a mouse. He took a particular liking to our strawberries, carving a neat arc from dozens of fruit in each evening’s feast.

We got birds. A pair of blackbirds which had not nested with us since before Luigi’s arrival returned, setting up home in the climbing hydrangea on the back of the house, unwisely close to the top of the high garden wall between us and our neighbours.

We got used to their persistent alarm calls, but one day they went into overdrive. The three beaks we had glimpsed in the nest were now three purple, chewed and rubbery messes on the lawn. At first we suspected a neighbour’s cat, but the birds’ rage when a magpie came and perched on the mulberry showed us where the blame lay.

Despite their bereavement, the blackbirds stayed, and were joined by blue tits, wrens and a robin. All proved industrious. They worked the garden like panners gleaning gold from a stream. For the first time we could dispense with slug pellets, because the birds coped with these pests for us. Our roses were free from greenfly, our flowers from blackfly and our cabbages didn’t end up like green lace doilies.

Without Luigi standing guard, the garden became fair game for the other cats in the neighbourhood. As is usual in the suburbs, there were far too many. One had a liking for frogs. So, when the dozens of tiny froglets went pinging around like tiddlywinks they promptly got munched. And now there is no spawn in the spring, no pleasure in watching the tadpoles come to life on hot afternoons.

So, Luigi’s passing brought plenty of changes to the garden. I welcomed the birds, and I didn’t miss the slugs. But I do miss our garden cat. And it may be time to try to find another. Except, I fear he is irreplaceable.

Two weird clients today. No, not weird actually –just typical. I’m seeing the pattern: Spoilt, demanding and always right. Just like teenagers. This morning it was a very grand house on a square in what I’m sure they call Islington but which I call Kings Cross. As usual I had to park a couple of streets away, feed the meter several quid for every hour and lug the gear.

He’s a senior editor of a national newspaper, she’s a writer, or so the Philippina nanny told me when they’d rushed off to work in twin black cabs and she was relaxing with a coffee while the kids wailed – ignored - in another room.

I’d got off to a bad start with him. He answered the door in a white towelling bathrobe looking bleary, and showed me out of a side door to get my stuff. He put it on the latch, but when I returned the door wouldn’t open. So I had to ring the front doorbell again. There was no answer, but when I came back five minutes later I got him again, and he was very huffy, insisting the door was on the latch. He yanked it to show me, at which point the bathrobe came open. He grabbed at it in a way that suggested he didn’t have anything else on, and when the door refused to budge he harrumphed and stomped of. Always right you see.

I had to power wash the York stone, which was a very messy job. The garden was a tiny courtyard dropping in two stages to a well alongside the house.
The well and steps seemed perfectly angled to send my jet of water blasting back over me, and the machine kept cutting out. I had to bang it repeatedly on the floor to get it going again. So I got soaked and filthy, but the dull grey stone was transformed to a lovely soft golden colour.

And it poured with rain all the time I was working. I had the cable and socket in a plastic bag but was ready for an electric shock at any time.

This afternoon it was off to Richmond to an American woman. On the phone she’d said she wanted her lawn re-seeded, but when I got there she said she wasn’t happy with its shape. It sagged in the middle, and what she wanted was a gentle mound. So it was off to Homebase for some topsoil. As I piled up the soil she’d come out and say “Higher” or “More rounded.” It had taken a couple of tons by the time she was satisfied. I only have a small van, and it was rearing up like frightened horse each time I loaded up. I had to pile bags on the passenger seat and under my feet to balance things out a bit.

I finished off just as the rain came down once again. As I left she asked me how long until the lawn would grow. I told her the seed should sprout in 10 to 14 days, and she looked disappointed. No, she looked more than disappointed; she looked like she was sure I was cheating her with inferior slow grass when she was paying for Speedy Green.

“Well,” she said, “I guess it better had.”

Demanding you see.

I got a call from a big-time garden designer today, and met up with him on my way home. He is putting a £50,000 garden behind a £1.5m house beneath the M4 flyover in Chiswick. This garden will have 1,000 plants squeezed into it. He said that an expensive garden is the latest must-have for people in houses where they've already got the high-tech kitchen, conservatory and quite possibly pool, hot-tub or sauna sorted. But what most of his customers don't realise is that a garden needs to be looked after - that plants die if they aren't watered, so they really need a gardener too. Which is where I come in. He'll give my name to anyone he thinks might need me.

Another garden designer who’s put some work my way says most of his customers have no grasp of the fact that plants grow, so they expect them to arrive at full size, and if they get any bigger they complain. He insists he puts in an irrigation system in any new garden. This is James, who says all garden designers come to hate their clients in time. I think I can see why.