Well I’d rather hoped that TalkTalk were going to fix our Internet connection, but now it doesn’t work at all. I’m optimistically hoping that this is because they’ve switched it off while they fix it, but we’ll see. In the meantime, here I am in a cybercafe again. Hello!

I am rather relying on the connection at home coming magically to life some time later this evening so I can set up the advent calendar. I suppose that in theory I should be able to do it from here - though I’ll have to rehash last year’s background picture since I didn’t think to bring the new one with me - but that might turn out to be more trouble than it’s worth. I shall attempt it once I’ve finished writing this.

Which will probably happen quite soon, because I do seem to have completely run out of things to blog about recently. Oh, you’d noticed? Yes, I suppose you would have done. No doubt that situation will right itself in due course - in the meantime, do feel free to find other hobbies and interests to pass some of the time that you would otherwise spend basking in my brilliance were I being more interesting.

And now I’ll go and try to sort out the advent calendar. Blame TalkTalk if it all goes horribly wrong.

Or blame me. Your choice, really.

So, yeah, TalkTalk. It’s the worst thing in the whole world ever. If you ever have to choose between using TalkTalk broadband or eating the weight of one of The Golden Girls in dog poo, I’d give serious thought to Estelle Getty.

I shall now show staggering restraint and say no more about the issue, unless they do anything else to annoy me (which you can be pretty sure they will).

What else shall I tell you about? Well for a start, it’s very nearly December, so I need YOU to supply Christmassy pictures to go on this year’s advent calendar. So go and do it now. If the xth of December comes and there aren’t yet x pictures, my website will blow up. And I’ll be holding you responsible.

And while I’m giving you forms to fill in, let me know when you’re free for this year’s Christmas meet. I expect it will be in January again, since everyone’s always far too busy in December, but I’ve put both months on the form just in case.

Now I suppose I need to tell you something more interesting, seeing as how my blog has been the Dullest Thing on the Internet for quite some time now, which is a situation I feel I really ought to do something about. Unfortunately I’m far too busy for that, so instead I’ll tell you about something which is quite exciting for me but won’t be remotely interesting to you lot.

Back in the mists of time, when I was a sprightly young lad, quite unrecognisable in the hoary old man I am today, I spent three pleasant years at the University of Essex. Strolling around the lakes, eating chips in the Square Three Cafe, and occasionally attending lectures on Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence; indeed, this was the place where I first indulged in that most satisfying and exciting of all human experiences, surfing the Internet. It’s a place that holds many happy memories for me, and I haven’t been back there since I graduated.

The thing that I’m quite excited about, if you haven’t already guessed, is that I’m going back there! This coming Wednesday! Because my lovely Jess might go there - though she probably won’t now she’s had an offer from York - so we’re trundling along to the open day. It will be rather whizzo fun to look around the old place once again, catch up with the rabbits, and generally have a poke about. And so that’s quite exciting really.

Except it looks like we’re not going now because I’d have to drive ten million miles and she doesn’t actually want to go there, so it would be silly.

I’d better go and do some work now. Bye!

I’m home! And look, I’m on the Internet! But all is not sunshine and happy bunnies as that information may suggest.

I’ve spent the last three hours trying to download my emails, and it’s still only managed to squeeze about half of them down the pipe. For although we do now technically have Internet access, it’s the slowest, most timey outey Internet access known to man.

The problem we had last week appears to have been a knackered router. Though it mysteriously became knackered on the day that TalkTalk were scheduled to upgrade our line, I don’t think an engineer fiddling with wires under the street somewhere could plausibly have exploded a box sitting in our hallway, so I’m tentatively letting them off the hook for that one. The coincidence was an unhappy one, because it led all involved to assume that the upgrade and knackeration were related, with the result that I didn’t get round to purchasing a new router until the end of the week.

Said new router is now installed, but we now have the speed issue alluded to earlier, which is making it all but unusable. This one is definitely a problem at TalkTalk’s end, and I shall be phoning them in the morning to find out what they think they’re playing at, but sluggish online research hints at a ten day training period your line undergoes when the upgrade occurs - what effect the fact that we haven’t been online for the first seven days of that training period due to router knackeration would have on its outcome I don’t know, but I suspect that may be the cause of this madness. I’ll keep you informed, though I can’t imagine any of you are remotely interested, so I don’t know why I’m going to bother.

Meanwhile - since I can’t really do any work until I’ve finished downloading these emails, and I can’t go to bed because it needs constant prodding when it times out - I might as well reply to a couple of things people have asked in the comments, which I failed to respond to previously due to non-onlineage.

JG asked:

You wouldn’t recommend TalkTalk, then?

Not with wild enthusiasm, but if our woes do turn out to be entirely the result of our router blowing up, I’ll grudgingly desist from actively recommending against them.

Sarah asked:

Where are the wardrobes selling?

Oh yes, I haven’t told you about my visit to the factory yet, have I? Apart from the fact that I discovered on arrival that the address I had was the chap’s house rather than his factory, but his wife was in to point me in the right direction, there isn’t a lot to tell - it was quite exciting to see actual wardrobes with my actual pictures on, but the factory was just… well, a factory. Anyway, it seems that they’re not in any major high street outlets yet, but they will be soon. I don’t know how soon soon is.

And finally - for this is as far back as I can be bothered to go in search of questions awaiting an answer - the Merman asked:

I thought Jess lived in Lancashire? How can Leeds be ‘further’ north?

Aha, well, Jess lives around 53° 43.59′ North, whereas my sister lives about 53° 44.53′ North. So technically I was right, sort of. So there.

And that’s about all I’ve got to tell you, really. Unless you want to hear about my weekend. No? Suit yourself. I’ll go then.

But I still don’t have Internet access at home, either. This is becoming extremely inconvenient and making it increasingly difficult for me to do any work or even stay on top of what work I’ve got to do and when I’ve got to do it by. I’m losing my mind, basically, and I’m as surprised as anyone to discover I had one in the first place.

So I’m taking advantage of Jess’s Internet connection to do lots of lovely work this afternoon while she’s deserted me to meet her dad’s girlfriend. Except obviously I’m not doing work because I’m writing this, but I fully intend to in just a moment.

Except last night we downloaded Rainbow Islands, officially the best computer game in the history of the world ever, which I played about ten million times in my teenage years, and which it’s awfully tempting to spend the rest of the afternoon playing and not do any work at all.

But I won’t do that, because what with one thing and another I’ve done hardly any work at all in the last week, and it looks entirely possible that our Internet access isn’t going to be restored for several days longer, which means I won’t get much work done between now and then, which means it would be utterly irresponsible to not spend this little window of Internetfulness I have working as hard as I possibly can.

But Rainbow Islands is awfully good, you know.

Just in case anyone was wondering.

“Then what’s your excuse for not having blogged for a million years?” you ask (where ‘you’ refers to any member of the audience who is under the misapprehension that I’m typing this as they read it and can somehow hear and respond to questions they direct at their computer). Well, I shall tell you. Because TalkTalk smells, that’s why.

I won’t bore you with the details, but (and here come the details I said I wasn’t going to bore you with) our Internet wasn’t working yesterday so I phoned them and they said they were upgrading it and it would be working again within twenty-four hours so I waited twenty-four hours and it still wasn’t working so I phoned them again and they said it would be working again some time between now and Monday. How switching off our Internet access for a week so they can ‘upgrade’ it can be considered an acceptable level of customer service I’m not entirely sure, but apparently I can. So now I’m in an Internet cafe, but I need a wee and I don’t think there’s a toilet here, so I’ll have to go home soon.

That being the case, I shall not inform you of the latest exciting happenings in my life, but leave that for another time when I’m comfortably ensconced before my own PC. Except to tell you that on Friday I’m going to be paying a visit to the factory that’s pumping out my wardrobes, which I anticipate being quite exciting.

Further reports of my non-death will occur at some unspecified point in the future.

I had intended to be in bed by two. It’s already eighteen past and I’ve still got to blog, so we’d better make this a quickie. Happily, the reason it’s gotten so late is that I’ve got so much work on at the minute I can barely fit it all in - though the fact that I’ve had a two day week might be something to do with it as well - which is particularly good news seeing as how we’re approaching an expensive bit of the year.

Which segues nicely into what I wanted to talk about, which is Christmas. And all I wanted to say, really, is that I can’t wait! Christmas rather lost its magic for me, as it does for many people, when I grew up - for several years my Christmases were devoid of small children through whose eyes it could be magical again, and while it was still an excellent excuse to stuff myself with Maltesers and other unhealthy foodstuffs, I’m perfectly capable of doing that with no excuse at all, so that wasn’t really enough to make it stand out as a highlight of my year. But then my sister had the clever idea of making Christmas interesting again by producing babies, and so once more there were little people scampering around getting all excited that Santa had come and injecting the season with the appropriate awe. And now, to make it even better still, I’ve got a Jess that I can shower with cheap tat off the Intern - er, quality gifts - all of which means it’s going to be magical and exciting and wonderful and, in conclusion, I can’t wait!

Dear Simon,

I am pleased to be writing with the six month progress report on the patient to whom you kindly donated stem cells.

Following the successful engraftment of your cells, the transplant centre report that at this stage they consider their patient to be well. He is currently at home and has been given a 70% rating on the Kartofsky scale; I have enclosed a copy of the scale for your reference*. The hospital also reports that there are currently no infections and importantly, no return of the original disease.

Having said that, a difficult journey still lies ahead for your recipient and in spite of this good news, significant changes may have taken place before we apply for the final report on 4th April. The actual report should get back to us no later than about three or four weeks later. Let us hope that I will be the bearer of good news again.

With best wishes
Yours sincerely

Sharon Armsby
Donor Welfare Officer

*70%: Unable to work; able to live at home; care for most personal needs; a varying amount of assistance is needed; cares for self; unable to carry on normal activity or do active work

Hello! I’ve had an unexpected long weekend.

On Saturday Jess started having breathing difficulties again, like wot she had when she foolishly caught pneumonia. “Oh no,” we cried, “it’s come back!” And so on Sunday we made another trip to A&E.

Last time we went to A&E they gave her oxygen and did blood tests and x-rays and all sorts, but this time they just transferred her to a GP in another department, who said:

Doctor: Well it might be the pneumonia again, but on the other hand, I don’t think it is. What I reckon is that you’ve gone and picked up another bug which isn’t pneumonia at all, and you should just go home and take some paracetamol.
Us: But what if it is pneumonia!
Doctor: Hmm, I suppose I could give you some antibiotics just in case, as long as you promise not to take them unless it gets worse.
Us: Hooray! We promise!
Doctor: But on second thoughts I think I’d rather you came back if it got worse, so I won’t. Begone.

So home we went, and Jess ingested paracetamol, but matters didn’t improve. Whether they actually got worse is debatable, but given that her symptoms were exactly the same as they had been on the previous occasion, we decided the doctor had been talking a load of rubbish and the thing to do was go back to the hospital and beg for the antibiotics he’d denied us.

So we made our second hospital trip of the day. This time, unfortunately, the GP we saw was a different, and altogether more smug, arrogant and annoying one. There was a character in the most recent Monkey Island game notable for a big chin, camp voice, French accent and arrogant demeanour - at least I think there was, though it’s possible I made him up - but if there was, he was almost certainly based on this doctor, because the likeness was uncanny.

Doctor: Non, zis is not pneumonia. I theenk, leetle girl, zat because you are a rather stupid leetle girl, and not a doctor like moi, you are panicking and believe you have ze symptoms of pneumonia when zere is een fact nothing wrong with you, oui? I will not do anything for you. Go home and play wiz your dollies.

But he did say one thing that seemed like it might have some bearing on the issue, which was that pneumonia weakens the lungs, and might therefore be responsible for breathing problems even after the pneumonia itself has gone away. This was the first time Jess had come to stay at Goodway Manor since her illness - could it be that the antihistamines she takes to fend off the effects of her cat allergy are no longer up to the job now her lungs aren’t what they used to be?

This was our theory. Somewhere between our two hospital visits, Jess had reported the situation to her mum, who proposed that she might as well remain in Leicesecesestershire for the time being since she obviously wasn’t going to be recovered by the morrow. That had seemed like sound advice at the time, but if the cats were responsible, perhaps it wasn’t.

But it was getting late, so I changed the bedding and shaved the cats to minimise overnight exposure to their follicles, and on Monday we headed north to spend the next night at the farm, feline free.

On Tuesday, she still showed no signs of improvement until she started taking Lemsip. This evidence seems to get the cats off the hook - once again they had been accused unjustly - and suggests that the first doctor was right, and it is indeed another bug. Possibly bug + weak lungs = breathlessness reminiscent of pneumonia. In any case, she’s feeling a lot better now, so I’ve deposited her in her familial abode and returned to Leicesecesestershire all alone to get on with some of the work I’ve been neglecting for the duration of my unexpected long weekend.

So yesterday I went up north to see my lovely Jess and then parted company from her and went even further north, for Jess’s friend Simon and my nephew Daniel both had a birthday party going on - 18th and 1st respectively - and careful thought had determined that it was impossible for us both to be in both places simultaneously.

So up I went to Leeds and gave Daniel his presents - or rather gave his presents to his big brothers, who tend to take over proceedings whenever presents are involved - and before many hours had passed, all three of them were off to bed and it was time for me to retrace my steps and join Jess at the other party.

That party was a ‘come as what you wanted to be when you grow up when you were little’ party. I hadn’t planned a costume, on account of a) not knowing when I was going to depart from Leeds and therefore whether I’d be attending it or not, and b) not knowing what I wanted to be when I grow up when I was little. Since I was pushed for time, it seemed most sensible to just go as myself and claim that I wanted to be a freelance illustrator, but just in case it was something I could whip up a facsimile of in a couple of minutes, I said to my mum:

“What did I want to be when I grow up when I was little?”

It came as a surprise to me that I’d ever had my heart set on any particular career, but she didn’t even have to think about it.

“You wanted to be a womble.”

A womble costume not being the easiest thing to fling together at short notice, I decided not to bother. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of explaining why I’d wanted to know what I wanted to be when I grow up when I was little, and my mum and my sister seemed to decide that they weren’t going to let me go until they’d turned me into a womble.

So I was dressed up at high speed in a hastily constructed makeshift costume on a Friday evening. The experience seemed strangely reminiscent of something, but I can’t for the life of me think what.

Hello! I’m composing this blog entry in my head as I walk around the village at midnight, with a view to typing it up when I get home - which, if you’re reading it, I evidently did. I wouldn’t normally be this efficient, but I’m a bit pushed for time for reasons that will become clear momentarily, and I wanted to go for a walk because a) it’s something I try to do every day for health reasons in any case, and b) I’ve had a relatively stressful evening - for reasons that will also become clear momentarily - and thought some fresh air might restore some peace and tranquility to my soul.

The reason I’m pushed for time is that I’ve been a very busy boy. It all started on Monday, when I took on a job that had to be completed by the end of the week - which, since I’ll be driving up north tomorrow - or rather today, for as we’ve already established it’s midnight - is now. I assured the nice lady that I could get the job done in time, and told her I’d do it for three hundred quid. I’m usually a pretty good judge of what constitutes a reasonable price, but as time progressed it became rapidly clear that I’d seriously undercharged her, and I’ve been working more or less non-stop for three and a bit days to get it done. With hindsight, the fact that she likened the picture she had in mind to something from Where’s Wally should probably have tipped me off. Fortunately I managed to cram in a few other little bits of work along the way, so my week’s earning’s are vaguely respectable.

But all of that didn’t leave me much time for extracurricular activities, so this evening I’ve turned my attention to those items on my to do list that I really should have attended to earlier. This has involved doing lots of little tasks that should have taken a few minutes each, but everything that could go wrong went wrong and every obstacle that could present itself presented itself, and they took considerably longer. You want a case in point? I’ll give you a case in point.

my dad wanted to send an email but because we’ve changed from bt to talktalk the smtp settings were wrong so i changed them for him except i couldn’t find the letter that told us the password so i tried to work out how to recover the password from the mail client on my pc and i found a little application online that would do the trick so i downloaded it but when i tried to extract the exe from the zip file it didn’t work for some reason i couldn’t fathom so i tried a different approach and found out where on my pc it stores the passwords and how to decrypt them but i couldn’t find the one i needed which i didn’t understand so i had another go at working out why i couldn’t extract the little application and worked out that my antivirus software thought it was a trojan so i did some online research and established that it isn’t and disabled my antivirus software for long enough to run it but it didn’t tell me the password and eventually i worked out that the reason i couldn’t find the password was that there isn’t one so it was all a pointless waste of time anyway and meanwhile i was trying to send someone some money with paypal using the account i recently set up for my dad but it told me i needed to add a credit or debit card even though i knew i already had added a credit or debit card so i tried adding it again but it told me i couldn’t add that one because it was already in use by another paypal account even though i know for a fact that it was this paypal account that i’d added it to and not any other paypal account so paypal had obviously got its knickers in a twist so eventually i gave up and tried sending the money with my paypal account instead of my dad’s paypal account except that didn’t work because it was still set up to use my old debit card which got cancelled when someone tried to use it to spend a thousand and something pounds in a jeweller’s in athens so i had to enter the details of my new card and by this time the message i’d typed in to be sent along with the payment had got lost so i had to type it all in again and the whole exercise was getting unpleasantly stressful and my head felt like it was going to explode and i was this far away from a nervous breakdown and and and and and

And so that’s why I needed to go for a walk. I’m calm now.

I’ve been particularly rubbish at blogging recently and I was determined to do a proper one tonight, but I’ve only just finished working and it’s half past five in the morning, so it just isn’t going to happen. You can have a picture of yesterday’s dinner and then I’m going to bed.

Hello! Did you all have lovely weekends? Oh good, me too. But I won’t bore you with that.

I said I’d tell you about the hedgehog living in the garage. There’s not a lot to tell, really - she lives in a box and her name is Holly. Apparently my mum’s decided that nurturing malnourished hedgehogs is the future, and I suppose there’s a certain amount of satisfaction to be had from helping defenceless animals.

But there’s even more satisfaction to be had from eating defenceless animals, which brings us on to my dinner. The recipe I chose today was braised herb chicken thighs with potatoes, but when I got to Tesco I couldn’t find any thighs whose packaging assured me they’d lived a long and happy life romping in a meadow with other thighs, so I made braised herb chicken breasts instead.

In selecting these recipes, I’ve been careful to pick things that are supposedly healthy, but one thing about them that hasn’t been healthy at all, as many of you have pointed out, is the size of the portions. This would possibly constitute dieting if I was an elephant seal, but I’m not, so it doesn’t. And this confused me, because I’ve been carefully measuring out my ingredients and serving myself what the recipes allege is one portion, but it invariably weighs in at somewhere between six and seven tonnes. Only tonight did I come to understand the significance of this disparity when MMM drew to my attention the significance of the fact that I’ve been following American recipes. It seems that the position of America relative to the equator is such that you have to eat about four times as much as English people to stop yourself from floating away, or something, so what might be considered a modest portion in the US is enough to feed a family of eight for a fortnight in jolly old England. Henceforth I shall cunningly be reducing the size of my meals accordingly.

And that’s about it, really. Good night.

Today’s recipe was stir fried chicken and vegetables. And very nice it was too.

Several of you pointed out, quite rightly, that I et a tad too much yesterday. In my defence, I’d forgotten to have any lunch, so I was jolly hungry, but I realize that’s rather a rubbish excuse. Today’s looks a bit much too, but I consumed no more and no less than what the recipe told me was one serving. Actually it was less, because I was supposed to serve it on a bed of rice, but by the time I got round to doing that everything else had nearly finished and I couldn’t be bothered to wait for it.

I even considered going on another bike ride, but in the end I just went for a walk instead. I’ll be healthy by Christmas you’ll see.

And then I’ll go and ruin it all on Christmas day, obviously. Well, it’s traditional, innit?

There were lots of other things I’ve been meaning to tell you about recently but except for the hedgehog living in the garage, which I’ll save for another time, I can’t remember any of them now. Oh, I know, I was going to tell you about the multivitamin tablets in my printer.

Well what happened is, right, there are some multivitamin tablets in my printer. I had a bottle of such things - multivitamin tablets, not printers - sitting on my desk, untouched for years, slowly nearing their best before date, and I picked it up with a view to using them as ammunition to throw at Jess. I can’t remember now why I needed to throw anything at her, but no doubt there was a good reason. Unfortunately it went a bit wrong, because I dropped the bottle and an unknown number of tablets fell into the bowels of my printer.

It’s a relatively expensive printer, so I was quite keep not to break it, which meant I had to extract them all before using it again. It’s also a relatively heavy printer, so tipping it from side to side in an attempt to roll them all to places where I could get at them was hard work - see, that’s me getting exercise again - but after a while I’d extracted all the pills I could locate. Unfortunately, when I tipped the printer up, there was still the sound of one last pill rolling around that I just couldn’t locate.

Eventually, the time came that I needed to print something. Reasoning that the odds were against the pill being located in the way of any vital moving part, I risked it.

Fortunately for me - but unfortunately for you, if you were hoping this was going to be an interesting story - there was no loud crunching noise and it worked perfectly. So I’m going to leave it in there, providing my printer with 100% of its recommended daily allowance of vitamins A, D, E, C, B6, B12, thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, folic acid, and pantothenic acid. Its usual diet of paper lacks nearly all of those, so it’s probably for the best.

First things first, I remembered the thing I was supposed to tell you yesterday, which was that if you dressed up in a spooky costume for Hallowe’e'e’en, you must take a picture of yourself in costume and upload it to the special Hallowe’e'e’e'e’en dressing up game. I realise it’s a bit late to be telling you that if you didn’t see fit to take a picture at the time, but there we are. I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t get many entrants.

Now, my lovely Jess being considerably younger than myself, I feel it incumbent on me to keep reasonably fit, or else the day will come that she’s still a healthy, energetic young lady, rolling cartwheels and running half-marathons whenever the whim takes her, who suddenly finds herself encumbered with a wheezing, spluttering old man who has to be fed his dinner mashed up on a spoon and is no longer able to wipe his own bottom. There are lots of other good reasons to keep fit, of course, but that’s the only one that motivates me enough to actually do anything about it.

So I’ve been going on daily bike rides. But the trouble with needing to get fit is that it means I’m not fit already, which means that riding a bike is a painful, hellish experience, endurable only by constantly lying to yourself that one more turn of the pedals and you’ll be home. Every day, as I struggle up the hill and curse myself for ever purchasing the blasted contraption, I promise that this is the last time I’ll ever set bottom on its infernal saddle, but once I’ve got home and had a nice hot bath it doesn’t seem quite so bad and I manage to drag myself out the door again on the following day. The daily routine, though, has never lasted more than a couple of weeks before I really do abandon it altogether, until a few months later I’ve forgotten quite how much I dislike it and the process starts again. It’s a vicious cycle, which I wouldn’t mind so much if I wasn’t sitting on it.

Having accepted the inevitability of this pattern, I’ve decided that biking isn’t a practical way for me to retain my youthful physique into my nineties, so today I resolved to abandon this foolish intention of daily exercise and instead spend the time improving my diet. I will therefore be cooking lots of healthy meals.

Me and cooking have a history of not getting on. The annals of this blog record many disasters that occurred when I stood too close to an oven, but since those unfortunate episodes, things have changed. A few months ago I purchased Jamie’s Dinners by popular television chef Mr Jamie Oliver, and have made several of the foodstuffs therein with great success. But those I’ve done with the assistance of Jess, who’s generally less incompetent than I. Now I’ll be cooking on my own, which is never a good idea.

Still, my first attempt has been a surprising success. Tonight I made honey-soy glazed pork chops - I got the recipe from here, if you want to play along at home - and it was very yummy indeed. Here it is, if you don’t believe me.