In the Time it Takes to Drink a Cup of Tea

I hear the train a comin'
It's rollin' 'round the bend,
And I ain't seen the sunshine,
Since, I don't know when - Johnny Cash

My new GPS-enabled camera tells me I'm near Lancaster UK. I'm on a train on my way to Edinburgh with D. The man on the opposite side of the aisle has just told me that my "3" brand dongle is useless. Great, I have a useless dongle!

Which means I can't get on the internet. Can there be life outside the internets?

It seems so. I'm typing this into TextPad and will upload it to Blogger when we get to the hotel which is called Halcyon. I keep thinking "Halcyon Days" but cannot remember where I heard this expression. Is it the title of a novel? I seem to think it is, perhaps written by Evelyn Waugh. But I can't Google it. Is there life without Google?

I browsed The Times earlier. The London Times. Paper. I can't read the New York one until we get to the Halcyon and have internet connectivity.

I enjoyed reading The Times. It brought back memories of when I lived in London a hundred years ago. England is much the same as it was back then in the olden days, with stories about the Blitz, soccer and Labour politicians. Yes. Really. The Blitz. Hard to believe.

Talking about politicians, the Daily Mail has a news item about Tony Blair's recently published autobiography, "The Journey". Apparently people are going to bookstores and moving copies from the Biography section to the Crime, Horror and Dark Fantasies sections.

I try my dongle again. Perhaps it'll work now that we are in the countryside. A check of the User Guide tells me that after putting it into the USB port, you have to wait for the "time it takes to drink a cup of tea". How very English!

I bought a cup of tea from the train's mobile cafeteria. I've finished it now and the dongle is still not working. I suspect I drank it too quickly.

Yes, that must be it.