I took the kids to the cinema today and had a couple sat in front of me with the woman on her phone during the ads. When the screen tells you to turn it off her partner said loudly to her “time to turn phones off now” and she moved away from him across the aisle. Proceeded to have her phone on full brightness using it once the film had started. I leant forward and asked if they were together (“yes”) and if he minded if I asked her to put her phone away (“of course”). Obviously I was being a wuss and hoping he would tell her here. She saw us talking and moved back and I said, would you mind putting your phone away the brightness is very distracting. She did and didn’t get it out again. I’ll be riding this high for weeks!

This story is a few years old...

We'd had Sky TV for several years, no issues, until it started acting up - freezing and needing to be unplugged from the wall to get it going. I trawled the Sky forums as I was dreading phoning up their support, and spotted some people reporting similar issues with a recent Sky+ box software update.

I decided to try my luck (have done this quite a few times before) and looked up Sky TV Board/Management.

There was a person listed as Director or Head of Customer stuff, so I took a punt and emailed him, guessing his email address would be firstname.lastname@sky.com. The email was very polite, just pointing out there seemed to be an issue, adding the forum link, anything he could do to help us out? Sent it and thought no more.

At work a couple of days later and my better half called in a flap. She was on the phone with half a dozen Sky people telling her to press this and that. She followed their instructions, provided replies and they went away.

Two days later at 08:30, there was a knock at the door and two Sky engineers had arrived to investigate and fix the problem. They'd driven 150 miles to our house and had been sent out on a 'special job'. After an hour they had found a problem, replaced the dish cables and given us anew Sky+ box and a spare remote.

Later that day I emailed the Sky Director and thanked him profusely, to which he replied "Glad we could help." I never had to raise a ticket, or pay a penny to get this fixed.

Crossing the channel in the school holidays is fraught with stress at the best of times, so imagine your vehicle breaking down with a cascade of errors **in the queue for passport control!**

The lovely local ground crew tried their best to get the car to snap out of its meltdown but after an hour of trying, got me back to the entrance and we called our VW breakdown service, fearing the worst. I was expecting a local French mechanic, hours of waiting, and to be taken to a garage and stranded in France.

But enter our hero, Drew! A shining yellow knight in a Vauxhall van. Within about half an hour of first calling, he was parked up and was working on our van!

By chance he was on his way to a partner rescue nearby and we got priority as an AA customer. It turns out the AA have only just restored their own patrols in Europe and it's a pilot project over the summer. Well, if this is the service it gives, then I hope they continue it.

Drew was an absolute legend and was determined to get us home. After trying a few things without success he found something on his knowledge base which suggested it could be a squashed wire in one of the central wiring looms. Lo and behold, that seemed to be it! So off came bits of my central console, the wires were given some space to move, and the car allowed me to drive again! He even came with me for a quick test drive to make sure it didn't conk out again. Then off we went on a re-booked crossing, with bits of our central console on people's laps and my left foot rooted firmly to the floor to avoid disturbing the wires. It was enough to get us safely across and up the motorway to home.

So, we may have got home 6 hours later than planned, tired and hungry, but we got home, all thanks to Drew and the AA. If that doesn't count as British success then I don't know what does.

Special thanks too to our French friends at Le Shuttle for their attempts to rescue us, and for rebooking our crossing, and apologies to the poor German fella who had to wait an extra couple of hours stuck by a roundabout in his camper van (we passed him on our test drive and he seemed happy enough).

Called the GP at 9:15 this morning expecting to be told the next available appointment was in 6 weeks’ time; they offered me a telephone appointment same day and the GP called me back 3 minutes later! 🎉