An update on my cheap phoning France mission. I've now managed to get a prepaid calling card that only costs a whole 2p a min :)
It's a bit of a cheek really, because it blatantly costs more than that! You can phone a freephone access number, but then you get charged 6p a min, or an 0845 (lo-call) number, then you get the 2p charged to the card and the lo-call call charged to your bt bill... they also give a 0207 number for London and as the ClaudeStreet house only pay 6p for the 1st hour of any geographical number in the evenings it means that I've got the charge down to 6p connection (effectively) and 2p a min. Which is a damn sight better than the 4p a min I was paying before :)
It does however mean that I have to dial... wait for it... 35 numbers into the phone to actually get a phone ringing in France - and the card compaines DTMF listener is crap and can't cope with noise from my analog walkabout phone so keeps saying I've entered the wrong card number.
To combat this I've put on my geek hat and written a script for Strawberry (that's the linux box downstairs that does the phonelogging for the main site), which will cause it to dial the access number, then my pin and then most of the number in France, all I have to do is enter the last two digits of the phonenumber Amanda is calling from ('cause all the payphones in her area have the same starting numbers). Cunning, I'm well pleased with myself :) Another bonus to this is that I don't actually need to remember any numbers :)