Tony Quarrington

Isn’t modern medical science wonderful?  You can get a replacement knee or hip and have a heart or liver transplant if you need one.  And there are many other parts of your anatomy that can be mended and healed.  Well, today, I had my deformed dongle, which has given me a great deal of discomfort, not to say embarassment, for several months now, replaced.

Bent out of shape, not “by society’s pliers” but by my treading on it at regular intervals, it was still “doing the business”, albeit a little more slowly and gingerly than before. But today, on a pure whim, I walked in off the street in the centre of Canterbury, in the shadow of the great cathedral (perhaps, just perhaps, some divine providence was at play), and got it fixed.  My pre-Christmas blues, outlined in today’s earlier post, were alleviated at a stroke.  

The painless procedure, carried out without anaesthetic, was administered by two skilled and pleasant surgeons, and only took as long as twenty minutes because my wife, who had wandered off into adjoining wards, was needed to confirm that the replacement was in sound working order before we could be discharged.

If you’re still with me (which, of course, you are), and wonder what on earth I am prattling on about, the dongle is a mobile broadband USB stick 625, a “plug in and go” internet connection for my laptop.  The hospital at which the procedure was undertaken was a branch of T-Mobile.

Surely, you didn’t think I was referring to anything else did you?  If so, I am reminded of Max Miller when he said that “It’s people like you who give me a bad name”!