We have lost our emergency back-up 3 Mobile wireless coverage. The Systems Administrator has two dongles, a new one with a battery life of several days, bought for Cheltenham jaunts, and an old one, which at my suggestion the SA loaded with a tenner's worth of data and left with me while the SA was at Cheltenham, in case of problems with the BT line or modem. There is definitely something wrong with the modem, and the SA has got a replacement, but hasn't yet found the right time to grapple with the task of installing it. The line is always erratic, especially in a wild winter, living as we do towards the furthest end of a very long copper wire that snakes its way merrily across the rural landscape of the Tendring peninsular, dotted with trees all poised to fall on it, or at least rest on it a little.
The BT connection would not connect when I got in from my music society committee meeting last night, and the SA tried the old dongle, muttered that perhaps it was out of credit, and found the new one no better. They were both still out this morning, and the SA even took one on a walk this afternoon, to see if it was a purely localised problem, but it wasn't. It sounds from the 3 Mobile website as though the mast covering our area might have been on top of one of the towers of Mordor on the university campus, and blown off in the recent wind. That means that in the short term there is only BT between cardunculus and internet silence. It doesn't leave much of a margin for error.
It is so easy to assume that in the digital age of total connectedness, that anyone who doesn't respond almost instantly to our approaches is ignoring us. I found a message on the answering machine the other day, from a retired beekeeper offering a couple of his old books to the divisional library. It was a long and plaintive message, from which I gathered he had initially offered them to the County librarian, but he had emailed her TWICE and not received a repy. Implication being that she was deliberately snubbing his kind offer. By the time I caught up with him, he had heard back from the County librarian, and discovered why she had not replied earlier to his messages, which was that she had been out in Africa working on a beekeeping based economic development project. Nothing to do with not wanting his books at all, in fact, she was very pleased to get them.
As it wasn't raining I went and bought some mushroom compost, just a boot load, and finished weeding and mulching around the hellebores by the oil tank, so that I could put the picket fence back up. I pruned some branches hard back on the cut leaved elder while I was in there, to encourage it to keep renewing itself from low down. The hellebores, and indeed the fence, look quite smart, and I was pleased to have finished tidying the bed in time to enjoy the flowers. I'm afraid that after that I gave up. Although the sun was out the wind was biting. The SA had to give up on the walk as well. The fields are so wet, the footpaths are incredibly muddy, so that the walker risks a lost boot, or a spine jarring slip and tumble into the filth with every step. It didn't help that one of the SA's wellington boots has sprung a leak.
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