BT smell of poo

BT's broadband DVD makes it look so simple. A calming voice guides you through each stage of the installation process. There are animations to watch, and boxes to check. It's devised for people like my Mum, who know a computer is beige and has a plug. It's reassuringly based on colour-coded cables with matching slots, joining these together is described in simple language. 'Have you found the grey wire?' Yes/No? 'Ok, look for the grey wire in the brown box. Here's a diagram to show you where the grey wire is located in the brown box.'

Did you find the grey wire now?'' Good. Now look at the grey wire, it has 2 ends, can you see the two ends?'

'When you plug the grey wire into the grey hole the green light comes on.'

No it fucking doesn't!

'Please don't worry if the light doesn't come on, we can deal with this just a little later...'

Yeah, 12 days later!

I've got no internet until some BT technician can come to my house to sort out my phone line on the 22nd. And in case you're wondering, yes I did try both ends of the grey wire. Every BT broadband helpdesk fucker asked me to try both ends of the grey fucking wire. 'No 'fuckings' from those fuckers though, they were ever so polite. The apologies for keeping me on hold while they looked up the grey wire manual ('The grey wire has 2 ends? Ah, I'll ask...') went on almost as long as the tadadeddahdedompdedahdah music while I waited on numerous bored helpers. You know it's bad when they put you on hold to 'locate your case file'. I imagine my BT broadband case file will be a full, fat, file of information, yet still all members of BT staff neglected to add the important note, 'She tried swapping ends with the grey wire.'
It's a DSL cable you fuckers! The colour is irrelevant and both ends are exactly the same!

I bet BT switch batteries around to see if that works when their battery powered broadband machinery fails. No wonder the broadband connection to my house is screwy, maybe the technician will show up, dig up the road to find the cable, and then try swapping ends?

With no internet at home I've felt less inclined to blog. This has been excellent for the progress of the sceenplay I’ve started writing. I haven't been so excited about a screenplay idea since... Well, since the last one. No, but seriously it's good. Very good. In fact I think it's going to be brilliant. Great ending. Good beginning. I'm working on the middle, but there are bits I really like a lot.

I'm at that overly-optimistic stage. The trick is to keep writing when I'm 90% done and it's starting to bore me, and the next idea is enticing me with the thought that it's the best thing I've ever come up with...

No, but seriously, this screenplay is good. So with broadband problems and screenwriting love affairs I can't promise many blog updates. Probably just every lunch hour when I sit in Soho Square...

So if I had been blogging over the last few days I wonder what would I have blogged about? It feels like a lot's happened. Lots of ups and downs, and some downs and ups, but I've ended firmly up despite the downs. Thanks Steve.

And now I want to settle into my new house and be happy. I think that will be easy with someone nice to tell me the downs are very temporary.

Downs? Yes... I can't really talk about the GW, but the GW thing was bad. Steve gave me a pound to buy the GW. He said his Granddad did that whenever he had verucas. How very silly! But silly is very good. How can he even make me smile about the GW? I'll keep the pound somewhere special.

And there was Amy's bed. The removal men had to dismantle this to get it out of her room. When we came to build it last Friday we couldn't find the screws. The removal man had given Alex the Ex these screws. He thought these were for a bed that he was throwing out, so the screws ended up in the bin too.

Amy loves that high up bed, with its lilac tent-den underneath it. I spent 2 days in the week I left Alex building that bed, building it as if determined to prove some independent-woman point. I had blisters on my fingers, and cried when it defeated me. My brother visited a few days later, he built it for me, with blisters of his own, and I even heard a few muffled sobs.

So now I have that bed again, in pieces and with no screws. We tried to fix it on Friday, but it beat us then. Steve says he'll buy the right screws tomorrow. I don't feel worried about independence or blisters now, seeing Steve even a 'bed building' date will be fine. He mended Amy's bike, and we laughed about his manliness, and my insistence on calling pliers 'grabbers'. It can be fun dealing with a chore with someone eager to laugh about everything.

I have been an independent DIY superwoman at the weekend already. Amy wanted her bedroom blue. I said 'yes' so we spent Sunday afternoon decorating her bedroom. I spent most of it feeling crappy and mulling on the Steve-Amy dilemma, and wondering if I would be nuts to dump him.

The bedroom got painted. The painting was tricky, and of course it would have been easier if Amy hadn't been involved, but the room looked great in the end. I didn't dump anyone.

Amy's only comment about Steve was that he looked like xxx. And she laughed about him wanting to be a cowboy. I'd mentioned that he wanted to buy cowboy boots, and somehow she'd turned him into a ginger John Wayne in her head. I didn't put her right. I kind of agree with her. I notice a boyish enthusiasm in Steve sometimes, I think he has a 'playing cowboys' side to him, but thankfully he doesn't do serious gunfighting meanness. I still haven't found him the right sort of cowboy cactus as a housewarming present. I hope he gets his boots soon.

We're going to take Amy-Steve meetings cautiously now. I don't know when they'll meet again right now. I still find the idea of it difficult. My Mum never had a boyfriend after my Dad died. I think that was because of me and my brothers. If you put your children first it's easy to lose yourself in their welfare, to convince yourself you're doing the best thing by putting yourself last. I don't ever mind putting myself last for Amy, she's worth it. But Steve's here now, and I can't change that.

If I'd thought it through I might at least have been practical about whom I dated. One of my single mum friends had exactly the right idea when she joined an online dating site, smartly ticking the boxes for 'older man' and 'kids of his own'. I didn't think it through, and so somehow I've fallen in love with a 29 year old, who when asked what he knew about kids said, 'Well, I used to be one once.' Maybe he's young enough that his childhood memories aren't so far away..?

I care about Amy so much that it makes me a little crazy. I have lots of questions buzzing around about how it works when you love someone and also love your child? I have to keep telling myself that people make it work, but I don't have experience of it, and so I wonder 'how?'

Even something as simple as hugs. How do hugs work in these situations? I hug Amy lots, Steve too. Then I imagine being in the same room as both of them, and wanting to hug someone. How can I hug either? For now it seems easier to keep them in seperate rooms, and avoid complicated issues like hugs. They're both getting lots of hugs right now, and so am I. So that's good.

I do know it's not a long term solution. Steve, as usual, is being patient and kind about it all.

We'll have been dating two months on Sunday. And almost exactly a month before that we began emailing each other. Hundreds of intense email essays now fill up my inbox. I can't delete them.

I've decided my second favourite animal is a red squirrel. But that's another blog post...

Amy asked for a book about Jesus in the library today. She has a fascination with God stuff at the moment that I try neither to encourage nor discourage.

She would rather go to the National Gallery than the playground at a weekend, which suits me just fine. But she worried me the other day by a request to study Jesus pictures at the art gallery. Usually we look for dogs or friendly animals in the pictures, or else print out a tour and carefully give each picture a rating out of 10. Amy likes Jesus, and that's ok. I suppose... I went to Sunday school every week until my teens. Right, yes. Jesus, why not? I borrowed a book of children’s bible stories for her, I was happy that the one she chose at bedtime tonight was 'Jonah and the whale.'

I was happy because the very first story I ever tried to tell, in tiny scribbled handwriting in a little, lined, notebook, was a novel I decided to call, 'The Unwilling Prophet'. I was taken with the Jonah story and I'd decided to retell the bible story of Jonah. I wondered whether Amy would love the Jonah story in the same way I had?

'That was boring!' she declared. 'What did the whale have to do with anything?'

You know, she had a point. I never did finish my first attempt at a novel about that unwilling prophet. Instead I started writing episodes of the Professionals, with the emphasis on Doyle...

And now I write rambling blog posts, and overlong emails, and I'm a slave to my blogger.com and Hotmail bookmarks. I'm not sure why I was inspired by the story of Jonah so very long ago? I think I wanted to run away from stuff just like Jonah did. I think I still do, but there's never any escape, as Jonah found out. This week BT are the whale who've swallowed me up. On Monday they'll spit me out... Only I find the writing gods (or demons) can't be avoided, not even now. I'm finishing this up, and putting it on floppy disk to publish on another PC that has a grey wire in the right hole, and a green light that works as it's supposed to.