Gah. I knew this flat-move had gone too well to be true.

My telephone socket appears to be faulty in some way. Phone calls work plausibly well – I get a dial tone, I can talk and listen, and so forth – but if I hang up the handset at this end, it doesn't terminate the call reliably. I have to hang up repeatedly to make sure it works.

Irritatingly I found this out just after I'd employed Steve's cunning suggestion to move the phone into the study (get a phone extension cord, cut it in the middle to thread it through the hole in the wall, join it back together using a terminal block); so of course I assumed something in my own wiring was faulty, tore it all to pieces and did it again, cursing all the way. When that still didn't work I got suspicious, plugged the phone directly into the wall socket without the dodgy extension cord being involved, and found that in fact it fails even in that situation. And it also fails when I use my spare phone, so it must be the socket. Gah.

I think I need to get NTL to come back and do something useful to it. Though I'd probably better get my iffy wiring out of the way before they arrive, or else they'll just blame that…