Thursday 18 May 2006

INTERNET/OUTERNET

It’s been a harrowing time over the last thirty-six hours. The telephone landline is seriously - possibly terminally - ill! BT has undertaken to have find and fix the fault by - at the latest estimate - next Monday! In consequence, I have only intermittent internet access!

After an ‘outage’ that lasted 18 hours, blind panic began to set in!

Our dependency on modern technology - and our impotence when it ‘goes down’ - is, of course, utterly absurd, but maybe it was ever thus… Maybe in the years immediately following the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840, people got into a similar state of high anxiety whenever bad weather delayed the mail-coach from Bristol to London!

Who knows, deprived of seeing a Penny Black for a couple of days, they may even have wondered how THEIR ancestors coped with a communication system based on messengers running the length and breadth of the country with notes stuck in cleft sticks! Right now, however, the cleft stick system seems rather appealing…

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