So as a culmination of two months worth of chirpy letters and emails extolling the benefits of Full Fibre Broadband and BT Digital Voice (where you have to access your landline via your home router / smart hub), a pleasant operative from Openreach finally arrived on time at 1:00 pm today, spent 5 minutes attempting to chisel open the BT hatch in the driveway (which probably hasn't been opened in the last 30 years since the house was built), and once they had opened it, using copious amounts of WD40, declared that because we have "armoured cabling" running into the house (somewhat unusual, I gather) which they couldn't remove, they couldn't complete the installation of the new fibre-optic cabling today.
A man from "Civils" will have to come with a digger at some point and remove a number of flagstones outside the front of the house in order to bypass this armoured cabling. Then Openreach will have to come back to complete the optic job.
In the meantime we have acquired a large white arrow on our flagstones indicating the ones to be lifted.
When I asked about the time-delay for this, they said they had no real idea!
Still, we shifted a load of furniture before they came, hoovered extensively places which may not have been hooved for some time

, and annoyed countless spiders.
The question now is - do we put it all back, only to have to move it again .....
What a palaver!