Only connect

My laptop is a year old. The granite boulder on which it rested was, according to the guidebooks, 290 million years old. The granite was coarse-grained stuff, studded with oblong crystals of quartz and feldspar, and furry with lichen. My laptop is made of shiny black plastic, usually marred by my greasy palm prints, though it buffs up nicely with a tissue. Both granite boulder and the plastic laptop shell have previously been in a molten state and then cooled. They had that in common. But the laptop looked worthless next to the stone.

I made this daft comparison while waiting for my email web page to load via my new dongle. Dongles have been around for ages, but I hadn’t used one before. They receive a signal from your network (I was promised by the woman in the shop) just like a mobile phone. Instead of using the dongle to talk, however, you plug it into your laptop to gain access to the internet while on the move.