I had a terrible experience late last night.
I came to the computer to discover a message from a friend, telling me that she could not see these pages.
Of course I assumed that this would be down to somebody else’s internetty incompetence, because obviously my diary is a perfectly functioning piece of social media, designed and administrated by me, and therefore full of smoothly gliding bits of code all designed to make sure the reading experience is fluid and seamless.
None of the bits of code are designed by me really. I have difficulty with any computing instruction which is more complicated than Click Here. I have learned, painfully, over the years, what the difference might be between a Widget and a Plug In, but my expertise ends there.
Imagine my horror, then, when I uploaded the page to find a banner headline telling me that my website had become critically ill whilst I had been eating spaghetti bolognaise and watching the National Theatre and drinking too much of the Co-op’s truly dreadful red wine.
The National Theatre play was brilliant, though. We had to stop watching in the end because so many people were using the mighty Internet that it would not download properly, and after a while the cast were gaping silently like goldfish belonging to an unsupervised toddler, but we loved it and will watch the rest later tonight, I hope.
I digress.
I could not even get on to the website to offer soothing words and life-saving respiratory equipment. It had developed memory loss in its death throes, and no longer knew who I was.
It had isolated itself away from all my help.
I sat in front of it cursing and trying everything that I could think of for absolutely ages. I poured glass after restorative glass of wine into my efforts, until I was cross-eyed and grumpy.
Mark had discovered a leak in his central heating pipework and so had not been interested in my difficulties. The occurrence of a leak was not exactly surprising, because under the current circumstances he could not get all the bits that he needed. The result of this was that some of the connections had to be home-manufactured by soldering together pipes that had been roughly squished into the right shape with more bits of pipe wedged inside them to help them stick together. He thinks that he had better write COVID 19 on the joints so that when some future plumber unearths them, one day long after our time has passed, he will be accepting and tolerant at the shocking depravity of the bodge.
He flapped about downstairs fixing the leak, which he did in the end, and I scowled at the computer and tried to work out how to get it to let me in.
I did it in the end. I am not exactly sure what I did now, mostly because by the time I managed it I was very intoxicated indeed, but by midnight Mark had leak-free plumbing and I had a functioning website and we both had a headache because of the ghastly wine.
Do not buy the bargain boxes of Co-op’s own wine. It might look attractive to a newly restricted budget, but I can promise you that it is dreadful even to somebody with as little discernment as I have. Also it comes in four-bottle boxes and so you have got to drink an awful lot of it before it is over with and you can justify some Merlot from Sainsbury’s.
I do not know if the website is truly fixed. I will have to wait and see if it continues to work.
We thought when we got up this morning that we had another leak, because the floor of the conservatory was wet.
We thought, with a horrible dreary gloom, that perhaps the pipes had leaked under the floor, and that we might have to dig the whole lot up with a pickaxe and start again.
I can’t even begin to tell you how impossibly dreadful that would have been, but fortunately it had not happened. The newly warm floor turned out not to have dried out properly, of course it has only been there since we started on our bat-flu related holidays, and after a few hours the water had all gone and our lovely conservatory had begun to be warm.
There is yet another picture attached. It is a beauty and a joy. Can you see that instead of wires sticking out of the wall we have got lamps? Obviously you can’t see that because it is just a bright yellow blob, but there is a lamp underneath it, because Mark has wired it all up.
I have not talked much about my activities of the day because actually what I thought I would do was my paperwork for last year. It is newly April and I thought I might as well be organised. I have been doing sums all day, which although satisfying and productive, does not make for a gripping read.
I do hope the tax office agrees.
It is astonishing what you can achieve when you do not have to go to work.
I know it is not a nice thing to say, but we are having a truly splendid time in our isolated unemployment.
Life has become very lovely indeed.
