I am growing less and less impressed with Thames Water. It was late November when we discovered — and promptly informed them — that our meter was definitely on a shared supply. That is the straightforward conclusion when your neighbour turns a tap on and the dial on the meter you thought was just for you starts spinning round, the test suggested by the engineer they had sent round.

I cannot blame them for the fact our neighbours were out when he did his investigations but it does seem to be taking an awfully long process to get any assurance that this message has registered with the corporate brain cell. Just today we had a letter noting that our bill was unusually high.

Yes, that is very clever data mining from their information systems but it misses the point that we know this, that they have sent someone round to dig up the pavement (they did find a small leak by the meter, which has been fixed, fortunately still in the bit which is their responsibility) and, most importantly, that I have contacted them multiple times over the past couple of months via several channels and am still left in doubt that they have registered the important matter of the shared supply.

I had been quite impressed with the initial response but am rapidly losing that respect.