No news is good news.

Back from a golden week in Paris, one week before Friday the 13th, to a satellite broadband that’s down, and a service provider that in my now near 6 decades of business interactions, takes the golden globe for complete disinterest in providing any customer service. ( ‘Beyond DSL’, for any one wondering about who these paragons are).

So I’m typing this with cooling coffee in a Lampeter cafe on a geriatric laptop, and pondering life devoid of internet distractions. A solution may lie weeks or months away – our village is on the cusp of cable broadband and a viable local radio/microwave system. But neither are operational now. And being ‘on the cusp’, here may translate into months, not weeks. Or even years. Jumping one way or the other will involve a big capital outlay, so for now we’re still considering the options, and hunkering down in a communications black out zone.

On the plus side, the house is wonderfully warm and cosy, courtesy of all the last two years of internal insulation effort, and I have huge amounts of unedited video from the last 4 years, which I’ve been trawling through, in a month of persistently wet weather. Yesterday saw me adding Rossini overtures to an hour long, time lapse sequence of last year’s eco-insulation project, which has had the tears rolling down my cheeks.

Who knows, if we jump the local radio/microwave route, we’d have unlimited data access, which might even allow video uploads like this. The downside to this system is that it requires direct line of sight with the nearest station/property – any intervening trees would block the signal. And might not be growing on our land.

Today sees the planning meeting for a new mast which would permit the company to take on new properties in the village – once it’s up and running.

In anticipation of a prolonged delay in normal services being resumed, apologies to any regular readers out there, but just think how much more useful time you’ll have by not sitting and reading this drivel.

At times like this, it’s wonderful to re appraise what really matters in life.

Internet access is really not such a big deal after all.

And in a shameless pre Christmas plug, here are some of the latest silk scarf designs, carefully sewn by Fiona before her Over-locker packed up – twice!