Fraught couple of days after a good start to the week, when I won a pleasing game of chess against Greg to make it quite a reasonable beginning to the season. On Tuesday morning, however, my computer’s internet connection reduced to a crawl, making it impossible to use. This made me surprisingly depressed – partly because I was already very tired after the hectic weekend – and I found it difficult to handle. When I contacted BT, the woman I spoke to (after half an hour’s wait) said there was a nationwide network problem, which there patently wasn’t, and proceeded to try out various things like resetting the router, none of which was the slightest use.

I was then told to wait for 24 hours (why?) so I left it till this morning, then had a similarly fruitless conversation with another woman – or possibly the same one – trying to persuade her to put me on to someone who knew about Macs. After a long time, this happened, but although he made more sense, we didn’t really make any progress. In the end he left me with instructions on how to change the wireless channel after I found the ethernet connection. After much searching I did find the cable, but connecting it didn’t seem to make much difference, and when I tried to change the wireless channel, I kept getting shunted back to the page I’d just come from, and the Wireless option never appeared. Despairing, I moved the computer and the hub as near as I could get them to the phone in preparation for ringing BT again. When I set up, I found that I had a connection, and now (10.50pm on Thursday), I still have it. I am still nervous, however, because I don’t know why I have it. A totally frustrating experience that has left me exhausted.

Warm weather for the first three days of the week has now turned to something truly autumnal: damp and much cooler, just in time for us to have our hair cut, which happened today. Tomorrow the accountant comes and we’re out for lunch afterwards. Saturday is Charlotte’s wedding. Hope it’s a bit more summery then – and that my computer connection continues to work.