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. But I must be patient, she said. If the network signal is less than strong, the web pages load very slowly.
I was doing my crust by now as the deadline for my copy had whooshed past. Earlier, I’d tried to send the email from the peaty pathway that meanders up through the woods from the house. Encouraged by a one-bar signal on my phone, I sat down on a rotten log, plugged in the dongle and tried my luck. While waiting for my home page to load, a jay made a rumbustious entrance under the leaf canopy. It’s been a long time since I last saw one of these. A jay is a biggish bird, mostly pink and black, a bit like a chaffinch on steroids. His grubby head and neck feathers gave him a vagrant, ruffian air. I don’t know whether the violent prejudice shown against this jay by the other birds in the wood was due to previous bad conduct, or to simple racial bigotry. But they all dropped whatever they were doing and came in from every direction to launch attacks on him.
I’ve seen crows harrying a buzzard. With them it’s mainly bluff and bluster. These assaults by the local citizenry were furious, noisy and direct. The snooty nuthatch, the dotty wagtail, even the little poppet of a goldcrest, formed an alliance of the outraged and launched themselves at the jay like guided missiles, while fellows who couldn’t get to the scene fast enough hurled down abuse and imprecations on the jay from the treetops.
Momentarily all very exciting, this, but I had bigger fish to fry — like keeping in employment. After trying to load the web page for about ten minutes, the dongle gave up and a banner appeared on the screen saying (in so many words), ‘You’re having a laugh, old son.’ So I gathered up the laptop and dongle and continued on upwards towards higher ground hoping for a stronger signal.
The aforementioned 290-million-year-old granite boulder I now rested the laptop on was a mile away, near Haytor, which is one of the highest points in south-west England. I could see south Devon from the Teign to the Dart spread out before me in a jaw-dropping panorama, the glittering English Channel beyond. I couldn’t have gone much higher if I’d tried. But could my dongle get a signal robust enough to load a couple of web pages?
During its 15-minute abortive attempt to connect, I watched a dung beetle soldiering across ten yards of sheep-cropped lawn. Every summer one sees these shiny, black, heavily armoured chaps heading determinedly across the ground towards some unknown Mecca, with no attempt at making themselves inconspicuous. And one can’t help noticing the futility of such a policy in the dung-beetle shards, voided by predators, that litter the ground.
Narrowly avoiding cows and ponies standing in the road as if they owned it, I drove like a maniac down off the moor and made for the closest large-chain coffee shop. Fifteen minutes later, Julia, Barista of the Year (South West Region) 2009, was shaking her head at me across the counter. Whoever told me she had a hotspot had been misinformed, she said.
Now I was really panicking. In desperation I went to the dongle shop and threw myself on the mercy of the woman who’d sold it to me. This angel listened to my jeremiad and wiped away my tears. She took my dongle and exchanged it for a new one in case it was faulty. She drew clear directions on the box to a pub that had the most popular wi-fi hotspot in town, did the best full English, and served the cheapest pint of beer. And, to crown it all, she allowed me to kiss her warmly on her cheek on the way out.
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