Domestic bliss

Me and Mystère, sofa, blanket, a new book.

We hung out at home all morning, scarcely daring to leave the house in case the engineers showed up, and lovingly preserving a parking space outside the house for them. S then went out to try to solve a client's email problem (which turned out to be, as we suspected, an “inability to type the correct password displayed on a piece of paper in front of her” problem, known in tech support circles as PEBKAC*).

I had slept quite well and was definitely feeling better, but perkiness levels increased 100% when at about 1 pm there was some clanging outside and the doorbell rang. Two beaming engineers on the doorstep said, “We found a safe bit of wire we could use!”. They still grimaced when mentioning the state of the cables (“We don't do stuff like that in Normandy”), but they tested the junction box outside and the line into the house, rebooted the router, and … tada! No red light. S arrived home while we were all standing round smiling happily and congratulating each other, so he joined in with the congratulations and thrust a sample of a local product into their hands as a souvenir, before we waved our new best friends off to greener fields.

It was hard to credit after a week of enforced absence … we couldn't quite believe it was really working, and considerably faster than before. We made the most of it, churning through a backlog of hundreds of emails and working through the to-do list of replies, bookings that needed confirmation, and various other things. Just as well we did, because after S went off to his hiking club meeting at 5 pm, the connection promptly dropped again, and it's been up and down ever since, along with our mood.

However. The new Jonathan Coe has arrived! One of our plans for our enforced offline life is to read to each other, so this is a good start.

By the way: What I've most missed about no Internet is following what my blipmates are up to, but I'll never catch up with journals and comments! I will just pop in as and when I can.

* Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair