Modern Times

Disaster struck on Tuesday: my kindle suddenly refused to co-operate.  It had been getting a little slow on the uptake of late, and on Tuesday, rather than advance a page, displayed a lot of horizontal lines, then wouldn’t budge.  (I blame its having had to deal with Will Self’s affectedly incoherent Umbrella, which for some unaccountable reason is in the Booker short list this year.)  Management persuaded a brief flicker of life out of it, but brief it was.  We did all the troubleshooting stuff, but to no avail, so then it was on to the helpful young men in India via an appalling VOIP link, which probably accounts for their asking all questions three times.  Cutting a long story short, I ordered a new machine with a 20% discount, and it arrived today, 3-5 days sooner than forecast.  I am now slowly learning to drive the thing, and shall post the old one back tomorrow for recycling or whatever.  Today also brought, by courier, a couple of printer cartridges ordered yesterday.  My new laptop bag should arrive in a day or two.  Martyn’s birthday present arrived by the same route.  I wonder what percentage of manufacturing job losses is made up by courier van driver positions?

But most welcome arrival of the week was my computer specs, sent on by Kate and John after I’d carelessly left them in Lagrasse.  Phew.  It’s a tiresome fact of advancing years that I need at least three pairs of specs: the jack-of-all-trades varifocals (which are master of none, notably when it comes to turning out of oblique junctions), the reading glasses and the computer specs, with their minimal reading correction.  I suppose contact lenses or surgery would make life easier, but I’m not ready to take either step.

This year’s diluvian rainfall has found out one of our gutters: we’ve been treated for some time to a free water feature in front of the sitting room window.  Having agonised briefly about girding up our loins and doing it ourselves, we opted instead for GSI.  We rang George the gutter-fettler yesterday, and he sorted it out today.  I suspect the brackets were broken by the window cleaner we hired in preference to George, hence a degree of poetic justice.