Books, old and new; apples large and small

I have been finding my Internet speed absolutely hopeless. A test on it about a week ago showed it to be about 58, comparable with a dial-up service, even though I’m on broadband. I checked it because my neighbour also has a slow speed, though much better than mine. We think it might be our telephone line. On Thursday, my connection disappeared completely. Eventually in the afternoon, I rang Virgin and they told me how to reinstate it. I also told them about my pathetic speed, and they said it would be improved when I had set up my new connection.

Testing today gives me a speed of 237, which, apparently, is equivalent to 4008 kbits downloaded in 16.934 seconds. Though that’s a big improvement, it’s not great, and I don’t really know what it should be.

It was good to be reinstated – I missed my connection to the outside world. One day last week, my son emailed me that GD3, my 5 year old granddaughter had sent me a message. I eventually found it in my junk mail box, put there because of the heading ‘I love you.’ She wanted to thank me for honey cake, I had sent home with my son, when he came last weekend. She said, ‘ you are the best.. i love you …’ What a good thing I was able to find it. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on that.

The rain of a couple of days ago brought down about 3lb of Bramley apples – more or less our entire crop this year. I quickly cooked some for the freezer. It’s very useful to be able to produce a quick apple crumble when people are visiting. Last year we probably had a crop of 50lb of apples or more, ranging from tiny to huge 2 pounders. It is something of a relief, this year, not to have to peel, core, cut and cook apples every day for three months – I feel so guilty if I don’t try to conserve some of them – but the tree will probably be back on form next year.

My desk was getting a bit full up, so I had a blitz on office work again – filing, chucking and also sending out a batch of invoices, together with end of month statements. I’m not too far behind with things at the moment, which is good, because I’m out almost every day next week, and tonight at the launch of Irene’s book, Sold to the Lady with the Lime-Green Laptop about her sales and buys on EBay. (www.myspace.com/ireneblack) Should be fun. We were out too last night at an anniversary party.

I finally found time to select books for my prize for the First Three Pages of a Novel competition at the Winchester Writers Conference, in which Tainted Tree came second. So several books will soon be on their way to me. At the moment, I’m re-reading An Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler, for the reading circle in a couple of weeks’ time and I also recently started Middlemarch. I also need to spend more time on Tainted Tree, as Goldenford are bringing it out next year. So watch out, World, this is my big novel. You heard it here first.