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Yesterday morning. 08h00: get up. 09h30: vet, to give the cat its booster jabs. She was very well behaved and endured three needles, a general poking around, an inspection of her back legs and a weighing before she crept back into her carry box and sat, curled tight, on the blanket at the back. All over the vet’s black rubber table top there were little sweaty paw prints.

Arriving back home, she spent the first five minutes sniffing the carpet. I thought perhaps there was something wrong with one of the jabs and it had turned her mad. Around and around and around she went, her nose sniff sniff sniffing, rubbing up and down the green prickly weave until suddenly she realises the smell is on her tail. She jumps, as though she has been starled by an unfamiliar dog then sets about the fur around her bum with her tongue, licking off every last remnant of the smell of that black rubber table.

It was about ten by then. We were round at mum’s, so ate breakfast in the garden and then mooched upstairs to install her new wireless network. She’d bought it in kit form from BT and already had been on to the tech support line with questions about two conflicting bits of advice in the instructions.

‘Well just do it,’ said the man at the other end. ‘Just plug it in. A man wouldn’t read the instructions.’

Gee. Thanks.

So we did. We plugged it in. A dongle in the desktop machine, a card in the laptop and the hub on the desk and within ten minutes all was running smoothly. They could all see one another. They could create files and directories on each others’ drives, and with a sense of triumph we carried the laptop out into the garden to perform our first real demonstration.

And in the tradition of all live demos… it fell flat on its face. Just ten metres from the hub, the notebook could find not even a hint of a network in the air.

We moved the hub onto a windowsill so that it was hanging out above the patio. Still, the signal was weak, and there was do much lost data flying about we’d probably irradiated the whole neighbourhood with the contents of the hard drive.

An hour later, things were no better, and so we called BT. I did the ringing this time. And to be fair, the guy on the other end was as helpful as could be. He even asked whether we were trying to connect two computers on opposite sides of a wall. ‘Yes,’ I told him.

‘Aah,’ he said, then explained that that was out problem. You see, the instructions may claim that the service works within 50 metres of the base station inside a house, but that’s only if the house has paper-thin walls. What we needed, he assured us, was a card with a vertical aerial, not a horizontal one as comes with the BT kit.

Does BT sell one, I asked. No. It does not.

And so this marvellous wireless networking kit that we have been sold, which will solve all our broadband problems and wire up the house without any wires, if effectively useless in any house more sturdy than a shed.

A whole day we spent getting it sorted out, and then disassembled again.

Today, I’m glad to say, went far, far better. It started with a trip to Sainsbury’s to buy supplies for next week, when I’ll be camping with Paul. Canned stuff, packet stuff, drinks. Little bottles of shampoo. Tubes of toothpaste. Tea bags. Took it all home then blitzed tge flat in time for Mark and Ja coming around for a late lunch around the telly as we watched Amelie.

It’s the second time I’ve seen it, and it’s still as pretty and enchanting as it was the first time. Mark was able to analyse it with his film-maker’s mind and we all had a good chat when it was over about how the storyline flowed through, the imagery, and the characters. It’s good to be able to get another, more qualified view on things. I’d not spotted, until he mentioned it, how the tall bars on the father’s garden are like the bars of a self-imposed prison cell.

So, we ate pizza while we watched, and then had chocolate cake while we discussed, and by the time they left the kitchen was so full of washing up there were barely any cups and plates to do dinner.

I’ve not packed anything for going away yet, and it’s fast approaching midnight and time to do my slot on Through the Night. Perhaps that’s because we’ll be camping in Wales, so the language and the currenc are the same as at home.

It makes you blase, does things like that. Is that a good thing? Or not?

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2003 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.