SIM satisfaction.

I celebrated Wednesday's 'class Mass' at St German's, then returned home and cooked lunch, before taking Clare to the train for Coventry. She's looking after Rhiannon over the weekend, while Kath and Anto are gigging far up north in Cumbria. Apart from a couple of hours watching episodes of Spooks and Happy Valley on catch up TV, the rest of the day was devoted either to Lent blog writing or preparing material for the office. Somehow, even when I have time to myself and only me to look after, I still end up getting to bed later than intended.

I woke and breakfasted earlier than usual this morning, and having had less sleep than I really needed, I spent the morning doing very little, quietly, with the occasional doze in the armchair thrown in. One nice thing about being retired is not feeling guilty about such treasured indolence. I spent the afternoon in the office, by way of a visit to the Central Square building site, to take more photos of the construction work on the foundations, now under way.

I chatted with a lorry dispatcher outside a gate on Wood Street. He told me proudly that he'd seen 143 lorries of excavated subsoil off-site the day before. These are big vehicles, and must be carrying a 20-30 tonne load, so that's about 3,000 tonnes a day. The basement car park will be four and a half metres below ground level, 150 by 250m surface area. The weather as pretty rotten lately, but I was surprised later to discover it's over three weeks since I last visited the site to snap the progress.

After a wasted trip to the bank failing to satisfy all the requirements for signatory changes to the BCRP Board account, I spent another hour and a half on MS Publisher in the office, the set off to St German's for Stations of the Cross at seven. On the way, I called in the EE shop in Grand Arcade to top up my personal PAYG phone, and was told that I needed to exchange my old Orange SIM card for an EE SIM card, as before too long it would cease to be functional, now that the merger of companies at technical and administrative levels is moving to completion. As I had ten minutes to spare, I waited around in the shop until a PAYG SIM could be issued and top up payment taken.

Since Orange UK became EE, about three years ago, I have been unable to log into my phone account to check balance or top up as the Orange site denied all knowledge of me and my phone number or email address, although I could still top up by other methods. Also my present phone, about two and a half years old, has always needed to acquire the network manually, except when I'm abroad, where an Orange SIM still works automatically.

As soon as I returned home after Stations of the Cross, I swapped the SIM cards and found it worked automatically first time, perfectly. Moreover, I was able to download the EE mobile phone app, to enable me to check my balance and top up on-line if I wish to do so. Nice to have the phone working properly at last.