Changes

IT’S ALL change time. My computer expert, Rich P, the son of my old friend, Mr P, the music teacher, comes along to advise on setting up our home network. He almost hoots with laughter at some of system setups. “Get away, as fast as you can, from AOL,” he tells me. On checking our telephone exchange, he decides what we need is Eclipse as our new ISP. “It should run at least sixteen times faster you’re your present Internet Service Provider,” he tells me. (Personally, I have difficulty keeping up with our present one – 16 times faster?) But I must bow to his enthusiasm.

It shows my age, I suppose, but I find anyone who is full of energy, and youthful extravagance, very appealing to me. And very persuasive. (Exhausting, too, but that’s just my depleted stores of energy and lack of spare RAM.)

Anyhow, I’ve busily set up a new email address, this one with Google, and sent off a batch of emails to inform friends and family of our new location. On Rich P’s advice I’ve also reinstalled Mozilla Firefox as our main search engine. I always liked Firefox, and I’m not sure quite why it disappeared from our desktop.

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IT’S BEEN a good day, what with seeing our friends, Mike and Helen, and only spoilt by my semi-deafness. My old earwax problems have hit me with a vengeance and in both ears at once. I can hear – but it’s as if everything’s outside an oil drum. One thing you always know, when you’re with real friends, three hours seems like three minutes.

We stop at our favourite Cantonese restaurant on the way home, and have a delicious meal of chicken and mushroom soup, followed by pan-fried chicken in a lemon and honey sauce, exquisitely balance in true yin-yang fashion that only truly great Chinese chefs achieve.

I eat my meal using chopsticks rather than a fork. I was once told off by a waiter in Sydney: it was a Japanese restaurant and I asked for a knife and fork to eat my meal; he told me, disapprovingly, that if I respected Asian food I should eat it in the Asian way, using chopsticks. Cack-handed as I am, the waiter slid a piece of card between the sticks, and then attached a rubber band around them. This is the way the Chinese teach children how to use the sticks, he told me, and this is the way I eat my meal today. Today, the waitress snigger, at seeing the rubber band, but I’m too deaf to hear any disparaging comments she might have…