My persecution continues....

You would think that one of the few benefits of being back in a 'developed' country would be decent, fast, reliable Internet access.... but NO.

I seem to have been having just as many problems while in the UK as I was before back in The Unnameable Country - different problems, perhaps, but every bit as galling.

At home the connector socket for the 'broadband' broke, so we had to rely on dial-up via the regular telephone line, which was agonisingly slow..... but of course I missed it when the telephone line got cut off.

Luckily, the Internet access in the town library is now FREE (it cost £1 or so an hour when I last had to use it a few years ago); unluckily, the county council's IT service which adminsters the computers is still absurdly over-officious - or just random? - in the censorship regime it imposes. After one or two days of being able to keep up my two little blogs, I suddenly found that Blogger was now being denied me - apparently labelled 'a sex site'! I could still view blog pages OK on Blogspot; I just couldn't add anything to my own blogs - maddening! I had very similar problems the last time I had to use these library computers: it seems that any site I wanted to visit (really - anything: Google, Wikipedia, CricInfo, The Onion) would migrate to the 'banned' list after a day or two. Why, why, why? Is it just me???

Anyway, after extended complaining, I did manage to get Blogger restored this time.... a few days before I left town.

And now, here in London, the two friends I am staying with both use the BT Yahoo service.... and it is SHIT, keeps disconnecting every 30 seconds (the guy's connection is far worse than the girl's - where I am now - and made even more exasperating by the fact that when the connection relaunches it always reverts to his Yahoo e-mail account rather than mine: that has led to the loss of several long e-mails over the past few days, I can tell you!).

Probably things will be even worse back home in The Unnameable City.... but right now, I am itching to get back and try it out.