A Rainy Enfield Day - The Day After

I am very much 'out-and-about' today. Right now as I write this section sitting under an awning outside the Enfield Town Costa Coffee house (1:45 PM) the batteries on my 'NetBook' are getting low - a pain in itself - and now I have just been shat on by a big fat London pigeon. And now it looks as if his mates are all set to join in also - there are five in a row on a ledge about nine or ten feet above my head, with heads to the wall and with their bums over-hanging my table and quivering threateningly. The proprietors have hung up a rather unconvincing plastic model of a hawk to keep them at bay, but these things ain't that stupid. Besides, these are London pigeons; they probably have no idea what a hawk is and they have learned to ignore big flying things - they're buzzed by jets and helicopters all day long. .. The Ba*$@@ds!!!

Well that was yesterday - making this the first entry I have created split over two days. I had a little 'real' work to do - gratis, this, even though my pockets are fast draining - and then intended to finish off this at home. But the gods of flagellation and discipline were not on my side: the home computer initially crashed horribly on boot-up and from that point on - although I could access and search Google ok - I could not get my Google email to load properly, nor could I sign into Blogger to update my blog. Actually, it seemed to come down to not being able to use anything that involved a user-name and password. This morning the fault still persisted and was still present when I finally gave up and came here, to my friendly local coffee bar, about one hour ago. The weird thing is that the problem does not seem to be with the computer itself; I have a wireless router and connecting via that using the machine I am presently boring you from produced the selfsame symptoms!!! Yet all is ok working through the coffee bar's router. I checked my router's firewall but can't see any settings amiss - nor can I understand why anything should have changed anyway. Any ideas, people?

Not withstanding the above hassle, and not wanting the day to be a complete washout, I spent a few hours scanning stuff for future use. And hit minor pay-dirt: I had intended to upload a piece I came across - and scanned - over the weekend, on admission procedures (a letter published in an old copy of Janus) but then I came across this and my mind got to working. Someone emailed me recently asking if I had illustrations for my books. Well I haven't - I can't draw for toffee and I sure can't afford to employ an illustrator. But if I was to choose an illustration to suit a certain scene in INSTITUTIONALISED volume 2 - think late teenage girl, in a cassock and under secure ecclesiastical care - it would be this. Actually, if truth be told, it was the fading memory of this artwork - and the story that went with it - that inspired that particular scenario (I have previously published a section of it here somewhere - check out the blog archive). Anyway, I then came across another, unconnected, piece but one related to the background to that part of the story arc to which I just alluded and 'hey presto! I was writing - so let's see where that leads us.