Every Time We Go Away

The Internet Connection Collapses – September 2012

“I don’t want to hear about how the meaning and purpose of life is to play silly practical jokes upon a person, it’s boring!', says Hilary, after the mobile rang while we were in Poland, and it was Audrey in the office saying she couldn’t get an internet connection.

For it is boring, how the moment we go away, the office system breaks down so Audrey can’t do any work.

Normally I can get it fixed over the phone, but this time I couldn’t. I had no idea what was wrong.

Turns out that the router had burned out. How often does that happen?

A couple of years ago, when we were on a train between Paris and Milan, I said to Audrey when she rang on the mobile to say that something in the office that had been working away happily unattended for months if not years, had ceased to work any longer, “When we get to Milan, I am going to climb to the top of the tallest building, hold out my arms to the heavens and shout, ‘NOT FUNNY, BLOODY JUVENILE!’”.

“You’re breaking up’, said Audrey, “What was it you said?”

“I said I should think I bloody-well am breaking up!”, I replied. What I didn’t know at that stage, was that the carriage had in it a group of Canadian evangelical Christians.

The bunching of random events

Random events bunch, clearly they do bunch and this may simply be because they are random. That they bunch in ways that make the world appear to be playing silly practical jokes upon a person may have something to do with the way in which people in general organise their lives to try and insure against the possibility of hardship.

I used to think this often when we were running our hotel, where we were exposing ourselves to minor disasters (and possibly major ones too, though these mercifully never came about) whereas in our previous working lives we had insulated ourselves against that sort of thing for the most part. The trip to the office each day and the activities we were required to perform there were shrouded in metaphorical cotton wool to prevent us from getting hurt. Possibly the riskiest part of the day was the drive there and back, at those times when we drove it.

Once you leave the office for an extended period, though, such as we now do, we in effect invite trouble at mill. If we were serious about it we would make sure there was always someone on hand who could handle most eventualities.

But I have for decades been in the position of the phone ringing when I am clinging to the side of a mountain precipice by my fingertips (again metaphorically) owing to my technical knowledge that it was not easy to find a backup for within the organisation. One of my vivid memories is of being in a telephone box at Burrafirth, which is on the island of Unst on Shetland, outside a post office which I think is the most northerly in the British Isles, trying to sort out a problem at BNA who were my main client at the time, while my son Cy, who was about thirteen, slept in the hired Ford Fiesta dressed in a red-and-white striped pullover, and the rain tipped down in bucketloads. This was a particularly bizarre example of what has been a regular occurrence throughout my working life, so I suppose I should not be surprised that it continues, except that this bunching and randomness does get rather tedious at times, and particularly with something as unusual as a router burning out, but then as I said many people in effect insure themselves against untoward happening by the way they organise their lives.

Possibly fortunately, I have no belief in external deities either good or evil. My mother did, and when I would report the absurd things that befell me she would deny them, would not believe me, because the Fates playing constant practical jokes wasn’t what the world was supposed to be. My sister-in-law, Menna, is a bit like this too and she finds me sufficiently wayward that she says prayers for me, she says, or said – I haven't had any contact with her for some years – for Menna lives in a cocooned world by choice, she would argue that my fighting with the way that things are supposed to be is not right, not right at all, hence the prayers, to attempt to bring me back into the fold.

So I believe that there is a scientific explanation, which quite often is simply that things happen randomly, and we sometimes put ourselves in a position of being a victim of that randomness. And at that point I complain about the buggeration of life, which I shall continue unashamedly to do. Though I often think that it is a good thing that I have no belief in deities, for if I did I wouldn’t half regard them as ridiculous.