Another Belated Greeting

A Happy new year to all, before I forget!!! You have probably read of my internet connection difficulties over the Christmas period. Well unfortunately it continued, albeit in a different guise, into the new year.

Although I didn't touch a drop over what would conventionally be considered the xmas period per se, I had determined beforehand that I would spend a couple of days in the pub upon my return to London and traditionally I always meet up with my mother - and sometimes another couple of family members, though not this year - in a suitably agreeable hostelry or alehouse. This year, though, I also chose to cerebrate Twelfth night and the Twelfth day following. Consequently I was to be found in one of the two local branches of Wetherspoons over the last few days. As always, on each tavern visit I went armed with my trusty netbook - the intention being to work on the new book, deal with emails and perhaps create the odd blog update to boot!

The lack of any recent blog activity can be taken as evidence that all did not go to plan in that direction. Both my local pub branches proved to be suffering different router problems. A third establishment I tried, though it did have a working WiFi connection - of sorts – it was running so slow that it was only really feasible to send out a few emails before the battery in my computer started to fail: and there was nowhere to plug in the power supply either!!!

Then, over the weekend I went to stay at the 'significant other's' place. And guess what... Her phone line promptly went down (and still is down) and now we are embroiled in heated discussions with the phone company (BT) as to which part of the phone line they are actually responsible for and which proportion is up to us to sort out for ourselves. I am reasonably confident that I have proved the fault to be outside of the house, which was all that was necessary previously – but not any more it seems. Things are far more complex these days.

I have been doing a little work on one of the files still waiting to be incorporated into the book. That alone extends to around 62 pages, needs a little completion and major rearrangement / editing to make sense, so still a lot to be done there. In addition I am going to have to recreate all my Picasaweb albums in a different form, as I said last time. What I still can't quite grasp is why they also objected to the various women's workwear / uniform catalog scan albums, which surely were quite harmless. I have no way of gauging how popular those particular albums actually were and whether it will be worth re-uploading them elsewhere; so please let me know if you found them of interest and would appreciate more. What ever a decide, I shall leave the links listed in the sidebar until I replace each, as a guide to myself.

Meanwhile some kind soul has chosen to slag off volume 2 on one of the ebook sites with a vitriolic attack culminating in the statement that there is "nothing nice written anywhere between its pages" or some such thing - no shit Sherlock!!! It's not supposed to be 'nice' in just the same way that the 'Saw' film franchise is not supposed to be 'nice'. What gets me, though, is that the site in question includes a lengthy extract featuring one of the more graphic punishment scenes from the book - there aren't many and I tend to deliberately steer clear of the repetitive and ever more brutal beating type of thing written elsewhere by the likes of Victor Bruno (as much as I admire his work and have to admit to owing much inspiration to his writing) et al!!!

Got to go now - I'm in a coffee house and I hate what I would describe as 'coffee house music'; incessantly repetitive and intrusive south American jungle-tango-jazz shit... Sorry but I hate it and once again they have succeeded in driving me out after only one coffee. But not before searching out some nice inspiring art work, this one being particularly relevant to the storyline – see what you think.

Best wishes from a wet and windy and grubby litter-strewn North London where this music is now driving me to distraction.,, AAAAARRRRGH!!!!!