Let’s all do the Suffolk Hokey Cokey

You see some funny sights in our part of deepest Suffolk.

Like pheasants trying to outrun cars or pigeons head-butting bird feeders to knock seeds to the ground and then struggling to find their ill-gotten gains.

But perhaps the weirdest is the SHC (Suffolk Hokey Cokey), a very common occurrence, I believe, across not only East Anglia but the South West and Scotland as well.

It must seem like a very strange ritual to the city grockles as they wind their weary way down our quiet country lanes, looking for the Bella Vista B&B in Barningham or some such establishment.

It involves doing what at first sight looks like a strange fertility dance in the middle of a garden – one arm stretched out, waving gently backwards and forwards, side to side, in the air above the head while continually shifting position.

A sort of Morris dance for the permanently bewildered.

Or it can be a more relaxed version with an arm suddenly appearing out of an upstairs bedroom window, manically swaying backwards and forwards, up and down.

So what on earth, I hear my reader ask, is the SHC? Well, it’s the only way us country bumpkins can try to get a mobile phone signal.

How to make a mobile phone call in Suffolk.

You put your left arm up, your left arm down, you do the hokey cokey and you turn around – and if you are really, really lucky, one tiny little bar will appear on your signal meter.

But hurry, you have to strike while the iron is hot – that bar will disappear as quickly as it came.

Now I’m not normally one to moan but it does drive me to distraction the way mobile service providers spout incredibly misleading stats.

We cover 95% of the UK, they say if you ask about their coverage. A bit of panto time coming up – Oh, no you don’t.

You may cover 95% of the population but of the UK – no way, Jose. Yet you make us pay the same as our town and city cousins.

Frustratingly, a lot seems to depend on which village you live in and, I guess, how receptive residents are to having mobile phone masts erected in their little part of rural paradise.

I couldn’t believe it this morning when, while sitting having coffee in the brother-in-law’s garden a few miles up the road, I glanced at my phone and saw five bars on the old serviceOmeter.

What a shame that I didn’t want to use the phone at that particular moment.

Perhaps it’s time for the UK to adopt a fine practice from Portugal, where, rather cunningly, they disguise mobile phone masts as trees.

I’m off now to the end of our drive to watch the weekly bus swing past. And people say I don’t get out much.