Internot

So we weren't sucked into a black hole and my birthday happened after all. Well it did a bit. It was slightly ruined by a series of minor irritations and one big domestic catastrophe. A flavour of the minor irritations can be illustrated by this: I had 10 quid nicked out of the envelope left out for the milkman. I know, I Know slightly foolish payment arrangement but for a number of reasons and lack of headspace to think through a better one it was for the moment the one which was semi-decided upon.

The major catastrophe is my internet connection is down. Have spent the weekend (when I should have been out having birthday fun!) trying to diagnose the problem swapping cables etc before I get onto the ISP. Again for various reasons it wasn't thought to be a service failure with the ISP (the ISP website reports no problems in the area). Heavily leaning towards the theory that the modem is busted. The proof of this is this post which is brought to you from my laptop and via the relatively free (I felt morally obliged to buy some food and a coffee but the staff keep looking at me) wifi at McDonald's which almost certainly means its a hardware problem back home.

I was about to try this connecting to wifi at McDonald's test last night. It was a test of the same magnitude of the firing up of the Large Hadron Collider but the laptop battery died on me so I was sat there faced with some food I didn't really want a potential internet connection and a dead laptop.

My loss of internet is a catastrophe. A number of things I do at the moment are heavily dependent on internet access. Also being often housebound by caring responsibilities accessing contacts and information online is essential, paradoxically, to 'having a life'. I once read somewhere a survey that found that a significant percentage of people were more anxious about the loss of their internet than the loss of a partner. No doubt we could pick holes in a survey which found such a thing but I would not argue with the idea that being connected is an essential part of modern life, especially for people such as myself. It is not a frivolous luxury.

My Autistic son will also be devastated at the loss of it and while he is very competent with google and youtube he cannot understand the basics nor the complexities of getting the internet fixed; his solution to everything is sellotape. A devastated Autistic young person repetitively chanting 'fix it, fix it' for as long as it takes will add an extra layer of stress to the whole event.

On a positive note though some friends who were away for the weekend bothered to send me a text wishing me happy birthday which was nice and my elder son who lives away from home remembered independently that it was my birthday and brought me a clothes voucher for one of my favourite shops.

I know there's loads of stuff going on in the world not least the interesting political stuff here and in America and I have things to say about it but for now I will be tangled up in the pressing problems of getting back online and hope that the plight of the poor carer with the additional burden of trying to maintain networks and opportunities by other more labour intensive methods is as newsworthy in its own way as what royalty has for breakfast or indeed the leadership squabbles of the Labour Party. Get a grip Labour, some of us have real problems out here.

There done it. Blogging from McDonald's wifi. My battery life and the staff's patience maybe about to run out. 17 mins left. Just enough time to download some stuff on the Mental Capacity Act -not for me for 'work'- though I may well be needing it very soon!