When James said "Count it all joy when you fall into different tests and difficulties" he was obviously living before the onset of the exquisitely complicated processes of changing one’s Internet Provider! I am at present without Internet access at home (waiting for hardware, software) and doing a crash course in patient negotiation with multitudinous persons at several Help Line / Call Centres scattered from here to there in our globalised world. Clipped West of Scotland accent through clenched jaws customer, (Me) speaks to various support staff well-trained in customer evasion and redirection, who have my money and tell me different stories about how my difficulties are to be solved. Every one of them has said, soothingly, ‘I understand your concern Mr Gordon…..’

The result is involuntary enrolment in a post-graduate course in Patient Endurance and Serial Frustration’. So for now, Blogging will be intermittent, squeezed into those spare moments when I’m at a desk with internet access. In the meantime I will seek to learn the lessons that Providence clearly thinks I need to enage with……….. all comments to this post should seek to offer advice, consolation, mutual exchange of negative experience pour encourager les autres?