Hi folks! Today’s posting is I admit going to be boring. But the next one, later this week should be better: I going to restart uploading scans of some of those old spanking magazine Reader’s Letters pages that have influenced me so much over the years, both here and on the website. I’ve also been doing a bit of writing, exploring a different direction and including some femdom themes, some of which I’ll be sharing with you over the coming weeks. I bet you’ve been wondering where I’ve been? Well, ponder no more, coz I’m back. In truth I hadn’t intended to post anything more for a week or two following my last offering, but I hadn’t intended to leave it five weeks or how ever long it’s been! And fear not for my mental health: My prolonged absence this time has had nothing to do with me having gone down with a fit of the old ‘black dog’ (although I have been depressed at times because of the hassle). In actual fact I have been as fired up as I have been since I started the website and the joint graphics project with Angela Fox earlier in the year.
No; it was not my mental health at fault, rather the mental health of some individual or group of individuals (surely not a team – and yet surely no single person acting independently could cause such a rumpus) working at Supanet (my internet provider – or non-provider, as I’d started to refer to them as). They phoned me up, out of the blue, one sunny day in May and asked me how I found their broadband service. So I told them: At £19.99 per month for 8 Mbs (I actually receive closer to 5 Mbs), bloody expensive. So they offered me an optical fibre system (for slightly less outlay per month!). And like the idiot I am - seduced by the dizzying speeds they were quoting - I signed up for it!!
First they sent an engineer out without agreeing an appointment with me first (I was going out that day, leaving as he arrived). Then the sent two more engineers on different days (apparently – I was at home on one of those days and neither heard nor saw anyone), again without contacting me to make an appointment beforehand… And then the broadband connection went dead!!!!!! Assuming that at least one of those engineers had gained access and installed the all-important cable modem at my end, some idiot (clearly without checking the new all-singing-all-dancing optical fibre system was up and running) pulled the plug on my ADSL Internet connection, presumably at the local telephone exchange. And without home Internet, updating the blog and the website become no-go areas: There are just too many judgemental pairs of eyes keenly looking over one’s shoulder nowadays if using public WiFi connections – and a surprisingly large number of WiFI points here in London block access to adult sites too.
Then it took eons to get them on the phone – and when I DID get their (not so) technical support team on the blower, they went around and around and around chasing non-existent line faults: “…Yes mate… it’s yer phone line mate, yer line’s down.” “Err… I’m talking to you on it?….” says I, tagging a fashionable Aussie-style upward inflection on to the end of my sentence to underline the irony of it all.
You see, for once my often crackly phone line – the cause of a many a day’s snail-paced Internet connection, and part of the impetuous propelling me into going for optical in the first place – was as clear as the proverbial bell; I could hear the boogies rattling up the guy’s nose. On a different tack: I wonder if anyone remembers this title (right) from the late 70s / early 80s? It was the first magazine of its kind I remember beginning the use of the term 'college uniform', which was pretty meaningless here in the UK at the time. And of course, typically, in searching that pic out I just came across this one (top left) which could have come straight from a scene in the last book I completed, earlier this year (ALICE UNDER DISCIPLINE BOOK 2). God only knows where I've downloaded it from, but if I'd stumbled over it towards the end of last year it would have gone a long way in influencing that particular book - it certainly does a good job in illustrating the spirit of the book, that sort of pseudo-legitimised feeling, I was trying to put across. Yeah I know the placing and ordering of today's pics is a little counter-intuitive, but the picture with the nun in it looks more exciting - and I have always loved those rear-fastening hospital examination gowns which tie with bows up the back, which is what those two pentitants' punishment or chastisement smocks remind me of!