I woke up this morning to find that there was a problem with my broadband connection. The engineer told me that it was a network issue and it was being worked on but might mean that I would be off-line for most of the day. After a lot of cursing, some rethinking and a large mug of coffee, I noticed that it wasn’t raining and then that the sun was shining. On further exploration, I discovered that the temperature outside was actually pleasantly warm. Damned computers, I thought, I’ll have to work in the garden.

You know this pencil and paper thing could catch on.

Sorry the blog was late but it was much too enjoyable writing outside.

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I was going to do a blog today about the changes in my garden since Spring galloped through with indecent haste here in Lewes in the UK but downloading the photographs caused an irritating computer log-jam just as I was printing off a multi-paged document which then decided to print itself off again and all this whilst my freshly-ground Colombian coffee beans were mellowing in my cafetiere two floors below. I am not naturally hysterical (well, let’s just agree on that for the purpose of this blog) but I was beginning to despair at the waste of time, the annoying characteristics of computer technology and my own incompetence when a 21st Century  “person from Porlock” rang me on my iMac computer’s excellent inbuilt visual telephone system, FaceTime, and there he was sitting on my computer screen next to Horace, the spider, who acts as my permanent screensaver.

Actually, he wasn’t a person from Porlock at all (the surpize visitor who interrupted Coleridge when he was writing Kubla Khan), he was David, my old friend from Liverpool and, annoyingly, he was drinking a cup of coffee.

Well, he saved me from over-heating. he waited whilst I went to pour out my own coffee and we talked for much too long, a kind of water-cooler moment, so that there was no time for the planned blog. Sorry about that but look in tomorrow if you are interested in my garden. Needless to say, walking away from the computer problems gave the machine time to sort itself out.

Meanwhile it is goodbye from me, David and Horace. Have a nice day!

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I had kept putting off the inevitable with my broadband problems. I dreaded making the call to one of those call centres in the sky where an army of IT geniuses blind me with science and convince me that I am stupid.  I already know my limitations even before I am asked complex questions about my rooter  that force me to confess that I don’t actually know what a rooter is (or router as it should be spelt…thanks Claudio – see below). I panic about these things whilst watching my life float by, waiting in a queue for the high priests of Nerdom, listening to soothing words from an infuriating automatum.

Well, I did it. I made that call and I spoke to a human being who listened to me as if I actually knew what I was saying. To be honest, I think I did know this time. I had prepared well for the encounter and second guessed all the right answers.

My broadband engineer told me what I wanted to hear – that there really was a proper technical fault and it wasn’t some act of dumbness on my part that meant that my internet access crashed every time the telphone rang.

As a child I used to dread the arrival of the doctor even if I was feeling very ill because I assumed that he would tell me that there was nothing the matter and that I was wasting his time. Later in life I realized that I just had a terrible doctor when I was young but the fear has persisted.

Sometimes I would hope for some terrible diagnosis just to justify all the doctor’s visit. Yes, young man, you definitely have bubonic plague and a nasty dose of leprosy so you will have to stay in bed for a few days and take these small green pills. It was always leprosy and plague that scared me because I had seen Ben Hur as a child when I was suffering the early feverish symptoms of chicken pox. Those spots were definitely leprosy I believed, in my delirium,  as I waited for my parents to dump me in a cave away from civilization where all my limbs would fall off one by one.

Sorry, I got carried away then.  No, the broadband engineers where nothing like that useless family doctor. They told me that the rest was up to them and that they would test things at their end and that there was nothing for me to worry about. Then, a couple of days later, he rang to say the fault was in my house and all my fears returned with a vengeance.

Oh no, I thought, it is all my fault after all. I must have done something that was damaging the sacred internet – a crime against the modern age and one for which there would be a serious punishment.

So this morning, instead of writing this blog, I awaited the arrival of the broadband doctor. would he tell me off for wasting his time? Would he fidget and look bored when I told him my symptoms? Would he just tell me to get on with it and stop making a fuss? No, he didn’t.

He went round the house like one of those television series forensic pathologists looking for clues and evidence of ill-doing with a sinister-looking fault detector. I just made the coffee.

It was not my fault – it was a wiring and cabling thing – one of those problems where 21st Century technology struggles against early 19th. Century domestic architecture and for which, alleluia, there was a cure beyond moving away from my home town of Lewes in England where all the houses are unsuitable, thank God, for modern life.

I couldn’t help being a blogger-poet in a Georgian house and I will receive no punishment or penalty for causing such a clash of cultures.

My broadband doctor was great and, several long rolls of cable later, everything is now working and, maybe, it is even better than before.

In the amazingly calm world of my study now that it has no computer problems, with the sun shining through the window and a small wren singing in the bushes, I even wonder if I have got over my technology phobia.

If you are one of those people that I asked not to phone whilst my computer was crashing, you can dial my number agian now and I promise to try very hard not to sound bad-tempered when I answer your call. Unless you are my old family doctor that is…..I never want to see you again, OK.

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I don’t think I am more neurotic than the next man but others may disagree. Mostly I am quite calm about things or so I like to think. Maybe I am wrong. So I don’t want to go on about this for too long but, as you can see in the photograph, I work at a perfectly adequate desk with a spankiing new and totally wonderful iMac computer and I am just fine as long as I have a cup of strong black coffee to hand.

There is excellent light from the window here at the top of the house with a view over my little Lewes courtyard garden and a prehistoric, greenery covered, earth fortification, Brack Mound, from my window.

If I am lucky one of the local blackbirds will sing and my personal wren usually adds some reassuring twitterings. It is a fine place to work and I look forward to coming up here every morning after some tranquil if demanding kungfu and taichi in the garden before breakfast….

…and even the rather damp English weather hasn’t put me off my stride. I haven’t been flustered by the odd piece of accidental barefoot snail crushing either. Take yesterday, for instance – a day like any other when I came up here to my room a bit damp from the rain but happy. My morning routine of writing this blog for you guys was completed and I started work on a new poem with more than usual ease.  Often I start a poem on my writing pad using a pencil because I like the immediacy and the highly physical act of scribbling over errors and writing in improvements with a very visible flourish of enthusiasm. Yesterday, for some reason I decided to write straight onto the computer, my wonderful new one. Everything was fine until the dreaded thing happened……

… the phone rang. It was a well-meaning relative asking if I was alright but unwittingly her call sparked off the fault in my broadband connection and my computer crashed taking that poem into cyber oblivion.  “I am fine, thanks,” I answered through my teeth, “How are you?” “Fine thank you” came the answer and that was about it. Fortunately I have a pretty good memory so I picked up my pencil and rushed through the echoes of my morning’s work and got it, or most of it, down onto the pad where I should have written it in the first place. Why does knowing would you should have done after something goes wrong always make it feel worse? Don’t give me the answer because I already know.

This fault has been with me for some time, no, I don’t mean my impatience or my dread of technology, this fault between the telephone and the internet. Some of you may find computer technology fascinating but this is not the place for a nerd discussion and, before you tell me, I did go, last week, to buy a new broadband filter with surge protection and a small police blue flashing light thinking that this would sort the problem. It sits at my feet under my desk and for a while gave me a false sense of security.

I know what I have to do and that is the real problem. I have to ring my broadband supplier, in this case a company called BT, and, after some waiting on the phone, talking to someone who will tell me to check my filter and then to unplug the system and wait for a few moments before plugging it in again.

I have one all this not becaue I thought it would make any difference but so that I could tell the engineer that I do not need to do it all over again. Then I will spend several hours whilst he will try to fix it at his end – or her end, sorry.

Meanwhile, my brain will fizz just like it did when my poem disappeared.  I know I should make this call but I keep putting it off until I have nothing better to do than sit all day on the phone listening to someone telling me things that I don’t understand. I just want my fairy godmother really. She could pick up that crushed snail, wave her wand over it and turn it into an unbreakable and constantly up to speed broadband hub and, even more wonderfully, she will disappear without saying anything.

I am sure that my poem is never going to change the world and I hesitate to compare myself to the great romantic poet Coleridge but in the midst of my cyber rage I remembered his story of “the person from Porlock” about how he was interrupted by this person on a matter of business when he writing what remains of his wonderful, maybe drug-fueled poem Kubla Khan. Sadly, when he returned to his room he couldn’t remember the rest of his inspiration.

Sometimes I wonder what the completed poem would have been like but the fragment that Coleridge left has been an inspiration to me ever since some reckless but happily remembered days as a university student studying English Literature. I know, instead of ringing BT, I will dig out a book of Coleridge’s poetry.

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Hello there, if you can hear me…I am in computer Hell and this is an infernal letter in a bottle saying Help! I hope things will be sorted soon but until that, just think of those days when all you needed to communicate with the few other people  huddled wrapped in fur in your cave was a club to hit them with or a smile to say you were pleased to see them….well this is progress I guess.

I am pleased to see you though.

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