Quinquireme

Laptop still dead, back soon. I hope.

No doubt I will be blogging right through the festive season*, like the trooper (read: no-life saddo) that I am, but I just wanted to wish a very happy Christmas and New Year to all of you lovely readers, fellow bloggers, commenters and lurkers.

It's been another odd year for me, and you've all been instrumental in cheering me up through the bad bits and making the good bits even better. Thanks to each and every one of you, and I hope you all have a lovely time, whatever you're doing and whoever you're doing it with!

I look forward to reading your comedy Christmas deconstructions and New Year's resolutions in due course. And to catching up with me London-based blogging chums when I'm back in the big city in January.

Patroclus xxx


Oo, look at that, kisses and everything. Has my mum spiked my tea?


* This was an optimistic prediction, made before my laptop succumbed to a festive virus, and I succumbed to a festive bout of unhappiness that prevents me from blogging. Normal service will be resumed at some point, though, I'm sure.

If you liken the human brain to a computer (which is something I like to do a lot), mine is the reconstruction of the Colossus that those two unassuming chaps are working on out the back of Bletchley Park.

This is not because my brain is massive, revolutionary, or the first of its kind. Oh no. Quite the opposite. My brain is like the Colossus because it is devoting a vast amount of computational resource to processing just two questions, which are being repeatedly fed into it on an endless stream of ticker tape:

1. Will I have to move to the rural south of France permanently?

2. If so, how will the rest of my life play out?

There's no way yet of answering either of these questions, but this doesn't stop my brain from endlessly processing, processing, processing. Lying awake at night, processing. Walking in the countryside, processing. Having a bath, processing. Cooking dinner, processing.

There are a lot of things that are worse than moving to the rural south of France. Thousands of Brits do it all the time. Then they write gushing books about it, or articles in the Sunday Times, which attract other Brits, like the bodies of dead ants attracting increasing numbers of live ants. The weather is usually quite nice. The countryside is beautiful. The hedgerows are full of rosemary and thyme and lavender and pears and hares and snakes and shrews. My house is rustic and cosy. The food is cheap and tasty, the coffee is great, the views are fantastic, and the neighbours are forever bringing home-made pies and cakes round.

Wait a second, why don't I want to move here again?


ALSO: Note to Realdoc - I can't comment on your blog at all at all at all, which is really annoying me.

A France Télécom engineer just turned up to my house, unbidden, and switched on the broadband connection. Just like that. After three years of them telling me I couldn't have it.

I'm so happy I think I'm going to faint. Or lie down. Or download tons of mp3s from the Hype Machine.

Hurrah!!!


UPDATE: And now let us all celebrate my re-connection to the hive mind by listening to some stupidly catchy twee Texan indie-pop, courtesy of stupidly catchy twee Texan indie-popsters Voxtrot. Particularly recommended for fans of Belle & Sebastian, Camera Obscura, Lucksmiths et al.

Voxtrot - Trouble (mp3)

Ooh, I feel another podcast in the making...

When I bought my house in France in 2001, I never considered that I might ever actually have to live here. I was relatively well off at the time (no longer, sadly), my mum needed a place to live after she and my dad split up, and there was this huge ramshackle house going in this tiny stone-built hamlet nestling among the vines, for which the owner only wanted 290,000 old French francs (the equivalent of about 27,000 pounds).

'You paid two hundred and ninety thousand?', said my new French neighbour, aghast. 'Bloody hell - they saw you coming!'

I very rarely think about the future, so I never foresaw that my mum would be diagnosed with cancer, or that she would become so ill that she wouldn't even be able to make herself a cup of tea. So I went about my career in London in the usual way, eventually becoming the business partner of ex-blogger and international jetset businesswoman Tabby Rabbit, with a swanky office in Chiswick, a lovely team of writers and designers, and a tip-top portfolio of tech-industry clients stretching all the way from San Francisco to Dubai.

Which is all very well in London, but I'm now back in France caring full-time for my mum, while still trying to manage a team of lovely people in London, work across 34 timezones* and cultivate a tip-top portfolio of tech industry clients stretching all the way from San Francisco to Dubai.

And as if this wasn't sufficiently temporally and geographically 'challenging', just as I was on the point of leaving the country I also quite unexpectedly acquired a boyfriend** in deepest Cornwall.

All this would be OK, if it wasn't for the fact that when I bought the French house, I unwittingly chose one in a location that is infuriatingly just out of reach of the broadband signals radiating out from the two nearby villages.

They saw me coming, alright.

Trying to care for an invalid, manage an international business and have a long-distance relationship with the aid of one telephone line and a maximum internet connection speed of 45 kilobits a second is difficult. When one of the frequent Languedocien thunderstorms knocks out the telephone line for four or five days at a time, the situation becomes...well, I'm an optimist, so let's say 'laughable'.

Last night, though, I was listening to some music on my laptop in bed, when a message flashed up out of nowhere saying 'One or more wireless connections are in range. Click here to connect'. Barely pausing to wonder whether the first of those two sentences was grammatically correct, I followed the instructions, mesmerised by the possibility that someone out here in the vineyards of rural France might have a wireless broadband network.

Miraculously, it connected, I downloaded one (spam) email and scurried to MSN Messenger to see if there was anyone online I could talk to. Another message flashed up: 'No wireless networks are in range', and I was back alone in bed with my laptop.

I haven't seen the signal again since.

It's funny the technological luxuries you get used to. I bet Robinson Crusoe never had this trouble.


* I counted. Although some of them are the same, just with different names. Either that or there aren't 24 hours in a day after all - which may come as unwelcome news to Jack Bauer.

** Not that I'm complaining about this. At all. Quite the opposite.

...but before I go, here's a seasonal pumpkin bearing a festive simulacrum of programmable computing pioneer and persecuted gay icon Alan Turing.


Happy Hallowe'en!

Thanks to Cornwall Matt, who thought this might be the kind of picture I would like. And he was right!