A Vengeance Prayer to the Tech Gods

Is it me or have the Tech Gods taken to hiding the things we need to use their stuff in not-so-plain-sight? For example 

1. Apple thought it a good idea - after an upgrade - to make the lock screen clock display on my iPhone and iPad virtually invisible with their new liquid bubble unreadable display and then move all the settings that enable me to make it solid and readable again 

2. Paypal changed the menu choices I am presented with depending on my entry point, browser or device so I keep getting lost on their site

3. Microsoft made it very difficult for me to download their software onto a new computer without buying a new subscription - I have a family subscription already, I don't want to have to get another, there were no options for existing subscription holders 

4. Blogger made me clear my cookies yet again before photos would upload. 

5. Apple (yes, you again) have changed the place to clear cookies in Safari and the way you do that now. In fact I still have no idea how to delete individual cookies, I had erase all my web data to get rid of them. And whilst I'm on an Apple rant, I thought my camera icon had disappeared until it dawned on me that the black round thing is not a new on-line pool or snooker game, it is supposed to be a camera lens .... thanks very much, it's all so much clearer now (not!)

6. Messenger's blue "Send" button appearing and disappearing randomly. Several times recently, the button hasn't appeared. I select a photograph in a message and ... poof! It's gone, how the heck do I send this? I try again, still not there ... on the third go, it re-appears, sitting there as smug as a cat that's just been fed, making out it's always been there. Meta gaslighting its users - this happens far too frequently and don't try to tell me I must've missed it - I am not imaging this! 

7. BBC's i-Player's sound settings are so much louder than the normal TV, we're always having to adjust it down 

8. LG's black buttons on black devices - I can go along with the black buttons that have white numbers on them but note the Volume + and - slider has raised black symbols, I can't feel them and I can't see them in anything except extremely bright daylight, why couldn't they also be white? We mostly watch TV in the evenings - in low light conditions - we have to turn the big light on in order to alter the volume!

9. When MTM exchanged his Samsung phone for a newer model, it looked virtually identical to his old one so he had high hopes it would operate similarly. But no, the Volume and On/Off buttons on the side of it have been transposed for some reason. Out of sheer habit, he is forever accidentally turning it off when he just wanted to alter the volume. Why-oh-why change this? It just seems to be change for change's sake, someone justifying their huge design fee? 

10. Scroll bars have been sacrificed for the sake of a "clean look" on virtually all the Tech interfaces I have been using recently. I have lost count of the times I have assumed there are no more settings because a dialogue box hasn't got a scroll bar. Scroll bars are sometimes still there, they're just incognito now; you have to intuit that there may be one and click in an ever-narrowing area to get to see the rest of a box or page that might - or might not - exist. I now call them Schrödinger's scroll bars 

The way I find the setting I need seems to involve me putting myself in their shoes "Now, if I were a programmer looking to put this in the hardest possible place to find it, where should it be?" 

This then - my Vengeance Prayer - is for all the errant Tech Gods who have inconvenienced me and robbed me of hours of my time whilst I try to figure out their impenetrable thought processes: 

• May their phone unlock with Face ID only after the third try ... every. single. time. 
• May their AirPods connect instantly ... to the wrong device. 
• May their bin collection be missed, but only when the bin is absolutely full. 
• May every USB plug require three attempts despite being symmetrical. 
• May their screen brightness auto-adjust just after they’ve got it just right. 
• May passwords that “definitely worked yesterday” suddenly … not. 
• May all their loading spinners pause at 99% long enough to raise hope, then despair. 
• May their tea go cold whilst scrabbling about in drawers trying to find a teaspoon 
• May their on-line shopping packages be delivered to the one neighbour who has gone away for the weekend 
• May the batteries in their remote give out just when they've settled down to watch the finale of a series they've been looking forward to seeing all week. 
• May their one working biro disappear when there's a vital document to sign
• May they be forever trapped in the state of thinking "I'm sure this used to be easier"

We could be giants

We don’t ask for much ... just a dry winter’s day and a stretch of beach to stomp across like giants. 

Last December the low sun turned us into towering figures on the sand - taller, braver, and at least three feet more impressive than usual. 

On yet another grey, rainy day of 2026, we’re eyeing Saturday’s forecast … could we be giants again?

Clearer vision, cloudy logistics

MTM’s appointment finally came through for cataract surgery on his first eye. As I’d be driving him home afterwards, we sensibly decided to do a trial run to the hospital the Sunday before, just to familiarise me with the route. 

I don’t enjoy driving on the A1 (those slip roads feel alarmingly short), so we took the A15 instead. We got to Peterborough absolutely fine, turned round in the hospital car park ... and congratulated ourselves on being very organised. 

On the way back, steam started pouring out of the back of the MGf. I hadn’t noticed the temperature gauge climbing because I was concentrating on unfamiliar roads, but a kindly MX-5 driver alerted us to the dramatic plume behind us. 

I pulled into a supermarket car park and called the AA. They arrived in about an hour, during which time we bought sandwiches from the supermarket - not quite the Sunday lunch we’d planned, but needs must. 

The AA man suspected a faulty coolant cap. He topped us up with water, did a pressure test, and said we should be OK to drive home, provided we got the cap replaced ASAP. It was a good job we stopped when we did; much further and we’d have been looking at a very expensive engine problem. We're very grateful to the fellow roadster driver who went out of his way (literally) to help us avoid disaster. 

We bought five litres of water (just in case) and I drove home watching the temperature gauge like a hawk. Mercifully, we made it back without further drama. What we didn’t do was trust the MG to get us to the hospital on surgery day. 

There was nothing for it but for me to drive MTM’s extremely reliable Lexus. Just one small problem: it’s an automatic. I have never driven an automatic car, but needs must when the devil drives — and on the Monday before the operation I embarked on an intensive course in how to forget my left leg. It all went remarkably well. I now don’t know why I was ever nervous about automatics; they’re much easier than manuals. 

The last time MTM coached a manual driver through the transition (one of his mates), there were a couple of unexpected emergency stops as muscle memory kicked in and he tried to change gear by stamping on the brake. I’m pleased to report no such incidents with me. MTM’s former life as a driving instructor came in very handy. I took to it like a duck to water, though it did take me a while to get used to slowing down without using the gears — I hadn’t realised how much I rely on them as a kind of speedometer. 

Meanwhile, the MG went off to our usual garage. They replaced the water with proper coolant and booked it in for further investigation, which it’s undergoing today. They don’t think it’s the coolant cap. Fingers crossed it isn’t too painful for the wallet. 

Now for the important bit. MTM has now had one eye done. In the end it was a 12-week wait rather than the 16 we were warned about, and he now has a shiny new lens in his left eye. Once the cloudiness and gritty sensation cleared (about five days), he was amazed by the colours. His right eye still sees the world through a sepia-tinted cataract — he describes it as “pub haze”, from the days when smoking was still allowed indoors. In his left eye, whites are now as dazzling as those in a Peter Crouch advert. Blues and silvers, in particular, are startlingly bright. 

At his follow-up appointment yesterday, the consultant confirmed he's cleared to drive again. The downside? He’s gone straight back to the bottom of the list for his second eye, with another 16-week wait looming. This is especially galling when friends elsewhere have had their second eye done within a week or two of the first. 

The NHS used a private hospital for MTM’s operation - apparently this is increasingly common to help reduce waiting lists. As the nurse explained the delay for the second eye, we were sitting right next to a sign advertising cataract surgery for £2,750 (or £65 a month) with no waiting time at all. Is it terribly cynical of me to wonder whether that sign was there by design? 

Still - one eye down, one to go. We’ll keep the Lexus fuelled, the MG under observation, and our sense of humour firmly intact. The next episode of this saga will no doubt cover the adventures of MTM's right eye, a gradual return to full-colour living, and whether the garage can restore our faith in the MG’s (usually quite good) reliability.

Under the crab apple tree

I was reading a posting on our local Facebook community page today, there's a discussion about how Crabtree Road in our village got its name. This sparked memories I thought I'd forgotten of growing up in Cambridgeshire. 

There was a gnarled crab apple tree on a big patch of grass on a housing estate near to my childhood home. Ball games were prohibited because householders didn't want their windows breaking. To us kids it was still a playground and a battlefield. 

The fruits were tiny, rock-hard, and mouth-puckeringly sour (one bite was enough!) One older boy, whose name I can’t even remember now, had a particularly lethal aim. I learned to avoid the green whenever the crab apples were falling in abundance. Hidden in longer grass, they wouldn't even break but roll underfoot and trip you up. There would be a sudden whizz of airborne fruit, and either shouts of laughter as you dodged out of the way or groans as one hit home — it was chaotic, exhilarating, and terrifying all at once.  

I wonder where he is now. Maybe he became a world-class cricketer, honing his yorkers from an early age beneath that very tree. Or maybe he’s just an exceptionally accurate paperclip flicker in an office somewhere. 

Thinking of recent news reports of England’s latest Ashes series, I can’t help but draw a comparison: I’d rather face a rain of crab apples than the bowling in the last Test! Dodging those balls requires all the same reflexes, not to mention courage — and maybe a helmet too. 

It’s funny how a chance comment stirs a small slice of childhood back to the forefront of your memory. Unnamed school friends, impossible-to-eat fruit, and the lessons learned beneath a humble crab apple tree all coming back to me unbidden but most welcome. Despite England losing the Ashes, I enjoyed a smile recalling a lawless patch of grass from decades ago.

The Lady Wasp Vanishes

I am being terrorised by a queen wasp, it has been in my house for three days now. I think it must've been hibernating in our outdoor wood pile and accidentally got transported inside via a log for our wood burner.  

The first evening, I noticed it flying around in a dozy, drunken kind of way. It nearly drowned in our aquarium but the mesh to stop the fish jumping out saved it. 

I am not very frightened of insects, over the course of my lifetime and eight (? I think) homes, I have rescued many bees, wasps, daddy long legs, moths and spiders alike, transporting them back to the great outdoors by way of a glass and sturdy piece of card. 

The only things I do not save are house flies. If they make life easy and buzz around a window, I'll let them out that way. House flies carry campylobacter; food poisoning laid me so low for 9 long days a few years ago, I cannot suffer flies to live and so swat them without compunction. 

Anyway, back to the wasp, it damply flew up to the ceiling, banged itself on a beam and then dropped like a stone behind our sofa. I tried to locate it but it was nowhere to be seen. 🐝 

As long as it didn't get in our bedroom, I decided I could live with it spending the night in the lounge, I'd try to find it in the morning. 

The next day was really nice, cold but sunny, MTM doesn't work on Fridays so we wrapped up warm and had a daytrip to the seaside (Sutton on Sea). 

 

We had a lovely lunch at the Beach Bar with a glass of cider, cup of tea to wash it down. I just love these groovy patchwork chairs they have. Afterwards, we had a walk up to and beyond Sandilands and Huttoft. 

The National Trust is doing a fabulous job of converting a golf course into a wetland nature reserve. 

I forgot all about the wasp. 

We went to bed after the 10 o'clock news that night, tired out by all the fresh air and fun. I was just about to turn the light off when I spotted the wasp flitting about the Velux windows on the sloping ceiling. It had clearly been awoken by the heating, it really needs to be somewhere cold. Sighing, I collected my glass and card from the lounge where I'd left them the night before. 

The dratted creature did exactly the same as the day before, flew up to the vaulted ceiling, reached the apex beam, plunged in a headlong dive behind my bedside table and then did the same disappearing act. I became annoyed and agitated, pulling out the cabinet, moving things around under the bed trying to find it. 

MTM: Just turn the light off, it will go to sleep. 

Me: I can't sleep with it in here, especially on my side. 

MTM: I'll swap sides with you. 

Me: It might crawl into our mouths, sting us, our throats will close up with swelling. We'd be dead before an ambulance ever arrived to give us a tracheotomy. 

MTM : You sleep with your mouth closed ..... remember? Because of spiders? (I read somewhere that the average person eats 8 spiders in a lifetime this way). 

Me: I can't take the risk, we'll have to sleep in the guest room. 

MTM: I'm staying here 

 

So I reluctantly headed to the guest bedroom, taking a loving, last look at my husband who would - I was certain - die in the night.

Saturday morning arrived, I was surprised to find all was well, the first thing MTM said to me was "Bzzzzzzzzz"! You can perhaps understand why his nickname is Micky Taking Monster. We had a cup of tea in bed, did a crossword together and then started to get on with our day. After showering in our ensuite bathroom, I was halfway through applying my Merwave products to my dripping wet hair (you get better waves if hair is really wet) when .... 

I reached for one of the products but *there* was the same gigantic wasp crawling around the base of one of the bottles. I swore profusely, leapt naked into the bedroom to retrieve my glass and card, dripping water and product all over the hardwood floor. I was mad as heck, once I caught it, this wasp was going to die, no more Mrs Nice Guy. 

When I got back, the wasp had disappeared ... again! It had possibly dropped down onto the floor and crawled into the laundry basket. 🧺

I had to finish my hair nervously glancing around all the time, watching where I trod in case it was on the floor. After getting dressed and putting on my makeup, I left the wasp in the ensuite bathroom with the door shut but there is probably enough room underneath for it to crawl out. 

I have shaken out every item in the laundry basket, looked under the mats but it's nowhere to be seen. Now I can only wait in nervous anticipation for its next appearance!