Now there's a thing or two

Or rather, there's not a thing or two. What is it, you ask, that is not? Email, I respond. It's strange, but over the last three days the volume of email I have received has fallen to almost nothing. Almost nothing, that is, speaking comparatively. My spam folder is still getting between 100 and 150 emails a day, but that is down considerably on what I was getting only a week or so ago, but otherwise I have received only two or three emails a day that were not spam. I suppose it's because we are now into August and people don't bother with things in August.

My internet connection is still wobbly. My ISP announced a while back that improvements were being made to the service. As a result, the connection could be unstable for a day or so after the work had been completed. That was , oh, a couple or three weeks ago but I find that all of a sudden my connection can be cut for several minutes.

It's not just my internet connection. My PC is horribly slow and I really should get it looked at by an expert. I suspect that there are at least two programmes running in the background which are fighting for supremacy and this internal warfare is clogging things up. The trouble is that I don't know enough about these things to try solving the problem myself. It's a bit like cars. In the good old days I became quite adept at working on car engines despite the fact that I am not mechanically minded. Nowadays even opening the bonnet is almost beyond me.

It's not just email that's missing. The volume of snail mail has also dropped - and we seem to be getting fewer phone calls. I have a second line which is used for the Lions and there has been only one call on that in the last three weeks!

It's not just incoming email that is giving trouble. About 10 days ago I sent out the August edition of Jungle Jottings, the monthly newsletter for Brighton Lions Club. I learned yesterday of several members who had not received their emails for some unknown reason. Since these things are, I assume (I know - one should never assume anything), fully automated and untouched by human hand, it seems strange that an email can go astray. Even stranger that four or five out of a batch of 30 can go walkabout.

It's not just email that's giving rise to a challenge these days. Trying to think of a title for each day's post is almost as big a challenge as the one I blethered about yesterday - finding a fresh pic for the Stanmer photo blog. Especially when the posting wanders all over the place like this one. I certainly don't envy those sub-editors their job of coming up with suitable headlines for each story in the newspaper. But I suppose it's a case of horses for courses.