… read this posting, then the internet is finally back on.

Well, actually it was on this evening at about 17:00, for all of about 30 seconds. There was just a flicker from the modem, it began to initialise and then it packed up again.

And then checking the error ticket that I registered, it’s still an active ticket so even they don’t believe that they’ve repaired it yet.

But I have to go out tomorrow so while I’m there I’ll stagger up the hill to the Internet suppliers, and instead of crutches I’ll take a pickaxe handle with me. That will sort out the men from the boys right enough.

Last night actually was something along those lines too because I had another reasonable sleep – just waking up a couple of times here and there during the night. There have been one or two like that just recently, I’m pleased to say.

Even more pleasing is that when the alarm went off at 07:00 I was actually up and about. There have been one or two of those just recently too.

So after the medication, there was no internet to check the mails and messages. And no work that I could undertake either.

But I’ve not been idle. Far from it in fact. I’ve been making the most of having no internet.

First thing that I did was to go through the memory stick in the back of the computer. It’s 128GB and it lives in its little socket. Every night before I go to bed I back up the files that I’ve used during the day by copying them onto the memory stick.

Since I reconfigured this computer (in August 2021) it’s become pretty full up so I went through and reviewed all of the files on there. Many of them are superfluous, having been overtaken by events or saved elsewhere. And that freed a pile of empty space.

Having done that, I turned my attention to the main backup. There’s one of these server boxes in here with a couple of hard drives in it. I bought my first PC would you believe 30 years ago, in 1993, a 386SX (prior to that, Nerina and I had an Apple II).

Since then I’ve gone through about 20 or 30 hard drives of different descriptions and everything has been copied onto some kind of backup hard drive all of which has been copied onto bigger and better back-up hard drives over the years.

About 18 months ago, my backup storage became full and regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I began to go through and merge everything in to try to free up some space.

That’s what I’ve been doing for most of the rest of the day and although the project is far from finished, I ended up with enough free space to perform a complete and thorough back-up of the big computer, and there’s plenty more free space left.

There will be even more too as this project keeps on going, as long as the internet doesn’t start up again. If it does, I’ll have to go back to work.

But what’s exciting about this is all of the stuff that I’ve been finding, including all of our texts and programmes from when Liz and I were running “Radio Anglais” in the Auvergne.

Something else that I also found was all of my old University stuff. Those were the good old days when I was studying in the back seat of my car while I was waiting for my boss to finish his meetings.

Unfortunately I wasn’t a particularly good student because I couldn’t stick to the curriculum. I’d pick up something during the course and then go to put it into practice instead of reaching the end of the block. ONE OF THE THREE theses that I did for my degree was really good, well researched and involved a great deal of effort. I enjoyed every minute of doing it and learnt a great deal. But it was rather a shame that it went miles off-topic.

That’s the story of my life unfortunately.

There was some time left to transcribe the dictaphone notes. I had actually been away during the night, but not to anywhere exciting and not with anyone of interest either. However a young girl came over to me at some point during the night. She asked me how the door-locks on Caliburn worked so I took her over there and gave her and her her friend a demonstration. They didn’t say why they wanted to know that and I didn’t ask but it certainly seemed to be a curious thing to me that they’d be interested in something like that.

And later on the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union and I was fighting in the Soviet Union Army. Our unit was at the rear and the General refused to order us to the front. We prepared ourselves anyway and were waiting and waiting. In the end the General came to see us and told us that we weren’t going. I marched up to him in a very formal voice “we are going to the front and you aren’t going to stop us”. It was a very tense situation but in the end he gave us instructions and we set off. We set up some kind of preliminary camp somewhere. The front line was several miles away and we were going to walk to it. I gave instructions to the chauffeur to follow us with the car and caravan which would be our office. People thought that it was best to leave it where it was but I wanted it closer to the front line. He and the other chauffeurs were chatting to a bunch of girls in a field. We set off to march. There were one or two people heading our way as if they’d come from the battle. We could see planes overhead. We made ourselves psychologically ready for confrontation

Finally, I was in Crewe. I was body-filling a car door, making a bit of a mess of it. Someone else was with me. An old L-reg Duple-bodied coach pulled up. Although it had a couple of other operators’ liveries on it I recognised it as one of Barratts. Someone with me asked whose it was so I replied that it was one of Barratts. They asked how I knew. After the driver parked it he walked round the corner, boarded another one that was there and drove away. I said “let’s go and check the legal writing on it”. We set off to walk around the corner to where he’d parked the coach. Just as we were coming up to it someone else boarded it and drove it away. I said “ahh well, never mind”.

The physiotherapist rang me up to say that he wasn’t going to come (once again!) and it’s just as well that he rang because at that moment I was stark out on my chair. The excitement of finding all of these files must have overwhelmed me.

Tea tonight was a burger with pasta and veg in a spicy tomato sauce. It’s been a while since I had pasta and there’s quite a bit lying around here, as I discovered when I was sorting through stuff the other day. I might actually try some pasta instead of rice with my stuffed pepper next week, if I remember to buy an peppers.

But after all of this thrilling day that I had, I’ll transcribe a couple of the backlog of dictaphone notes and then go to bed. I’ll need a shower in the morning because the radio guy is coming to pick up my work as I can’t e-transfer it right now, and I have to go out to the letting agent at some point.

The physiotherapist says that he will come too, but we shall see. I’ve heard all of that before.