This is a bonding exercise with my stepson. We’re sitting about five feet apart in the living room tapping away on our laptops. And I’m doing it wirelessly.
His is/was a pretty decent nearish state of the art 16th birthday present. Mine is a retired company laptop with a small crack in the lid bound together by brown parcel tape (which I removed to see exactly that it was meant to be holding together). This is mostly an exercise to acquaint myself with the keyboard and layout. It’s pretty good for writing on. Better than the desktop ornament, anyway. I’m pretty certain Best Beloved is on the main machine in our room as I write this. We have finally achieved the goal of all twenty first century families, each of us being on his or her own separate computer and not talking to anyone else.
When the firm announced one of its periodic purges of no longer maintained equipment, I put myself down for a laptop on the offchance. I thought I could do with a typewriter to replace my 10-year-old, much loved but essentially defunct IBM Thinkpad (which I bought with money received for His Majesty’s Starship. A true writer’s laptop.). This came with hard disk wiped and a copy of Windows XP – nothing else. Then Bonusbarn pointed out we have some wireless adapters knocking around and I thought why not?
And so, apropos of nothing, I thought I would share my thoughts on the saga of our Home Secretary and her avant garde art movie loving husband. First off, it’s pretty clear what happened. She gets phone, TV and everything as a package from a single firm, as do we. She gets a monthly bill stating everything, as do we. It runs to several pages but that’s just the way it’s laid out. The bill includes movies watched. So far the biggest surprise we’ve had is that Bonusbarn watched Pulp Fiction at 2 in the morning over halfterm (we’ve since tightened up the parental controls). Ms Smith must wish she shared the experience. Anyway, she’s a busy women. She can’t remember the last time she manually went through the phone bill. She Has People Who Do That. She threw the pile of paper at a People and said “that’s the bill, deal with it.” And sadly they did.
What absolutely no one seems to be obsessing on is that somewhere in the House of Commons is a mole leaking paperwork like this to the papers. That is a disgrace and this person must be hunted down and destroyed. Though it’s probably not a priority in the House of Speaker Martin, where the historic privileges of our elected representatives that were literally won in blood are secondary to who gets to wear the nice robes.
Also worrying is that the national domestic budget is in the hands of a woman who can’t check her phone bill. Not even to weed out the business calls. I’m sure she racks up a hefty phone bill in the course of her duties, and naturally it should be claimed as an expense, but I can’t believe every single call was work-related. Or maybe she just makes domestic calls from her sister’s flat.
I would have liked to call this post “the porn ultimatum” but sadly the Sun got there first. I don’t often say this to the Sun, but, nice one.
