This morning in Mrs Blackbird’s nest I spied at least two blue eggs. I peered furtively when she’d hopped off to pick up a sultana or two. She spent all last week building it in a tub of ivy. It’s a metre away from my balcony glass doors so if I turn the tele round she can watch it in bed. I marvelled at her industry. I helped as much as I could by unravelling and cutting up bits of waxed garden twine. First she constructed a mud foundation, on top of this she did basket weaving with twigs and twine, then she carpeted the whole thing in what looks like astroturf. She’s used the back of the tub as an rsj and wedged the whole dwelling into a branch against the wall to keep it secure and out of the wind. Mr Blackbird didn’t lift a beak. Wouldn’t you know it. But today when I went out to try and sweep up he made a noise like a scud missile and dive bombed my ankles. Which is a cheek seeing as how it’s my balcony and my pot and my ivy and my sultanas… It clearly says in my lease that the outside area contiguous to my flat belongs to me. I signed no agreement permitting squatters to set up home and raise a family right in front of my living-room windows.

I can see her sitting out there, in there, now and there’s a hailstorm. I kind of wonder if she’d like me to put a brolly up for her but I have a feeling she’d rather I ignored her completely and just relinquished all territorial rights. I guess I’d better leave her be. You can’t teach a blackbird how to hatch eggs.

For two days last week I couldn’t access the internet or email. I made pleading calls to technical advisors at Madasafish dot god knows wot dot com. Each time I phoned I was attacked for an eternity by music that made me feel I’d died and gone to a wicked place. On instruction from Ravi and Rupesh I then typed strings of numbers into my browser address bar, typed la di da on the login page, clicked on setup then isp settings, typed and retyped some garbled user name and garbled password, clicked on apply and tools and system command and save all and status and connection status, ran the easy setuputility, and system log. No connection. No connection. Salman told me there must be something wrong with my SWAMG-52196 and I should buy a new router.

And time passed and the day went and life slipped by. I thought of how when I was a child my mother, while I skulked with embarrassment, would demand – demand with passion - to see the manager – in millinery, glassware and soft furnishings - of Mr Debenham and Mr Freebody and Mr Marshall and Mr Snelgrove. I am my mother’s daughter. I phoned up Madasafish and demanded – with operatic passion – to speak to the manager of technical services. I told Sanjeev how my life was in tatters, how I’d done no work all day, how I had extremely important email, files, manuscripts, documents, tracts and photos that must be sent that very day if the world was to stay on its axis and my sanity maintained….

He was very nice. He had a soothing voice. He spent an unconscionable time instructing me on what to type into my browser bar and how to reconfigure my encryption key and reset my isp username malarkey. No connection. Then he said he’d make some enquiries and phone me back.

Some hours later he told me there was a fault at the exchange. BT was working on it. It should be fixed by 5 pm. I’d be compensated.

That evening in our local Italian eatery there were quite a few people who’d had miserable days with their computers. Apparently it was a serious fault and offices were down in Moorgate……

Next day I still couldn’t log in or on or up. I phoned Sanjeev who told me the fault had been fixed, but all my configurations were now skewed. He talked me through it again, isp username, ppp settings, lan configuration bollocks. Connection. I thanked him profusely. A bit later I phoned back to say I’d lost my trusted wifi connection and did he know why and how I could get it back.

He said he wasn’t going to confuse me and I’d have to leave it. After about a week I worked it out for myself that somehow it was still there but had got renamed.

There are so many times when I’d like to go back to a pencil and a lined page and throw my MacBook out the window. But there are so many times too when I fantasise about a country house and a real garden and true love. The reality is I’m hopelessly bound up with this urban fiend of a machine. We are entirely unsuited to each other. We have nothing in common. I know it’s giving me a brain tumour. But it/she has a hold over me, I depend, am afraid and reliant on its/her (his?) superior stupid cunning intelligence. Can’t manage without it. Panic if it withdraws its cooperation or interaction. Don’t understand it. Don’t want to. Am lumbered with it. Need it.

‘Women who’ve had facelifts – they all look like sisters.’

‘You must never leave mummy and daddy.’

‘I woke up in the night and I didn’t know who I was.’

‘I don’t want to eat anything with a face.’

‘I’d like a hug and a squeeze but I don’t want what goes with it.’

‘You can’t learn anything you don’t already know.’

‘Try to say something nice.’

There’s a depressingly interesting piece by John Lanchester in the latest London Review of Books - an appreciative review of Nick Davies’s book Flat Earth News about the parlous state of British journalism. It explains why people like me, who used read newspapers each day for information, now scarcely bother with them. The salient points are these:

Contemporary journalism is corrupted by an endemic failure to verify facts and stories.

Papers have switched from reporting facts to opinions from columnists.

Only twelve per cent of what’s in them is material the reporter has found out and checked on her or his own initiative.

Eighty-eight per cent is ‘churnalism’ - rewritten wire copy, mainly from the Press Association, and Public Relations organisations.

Press Association staffers write an average of ten stories in a single shift. ‘If the government says Saddam has WDM that’s what the PA will report.’

Modern journalism is now ‘the rapid repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand material, much of it designed to service the political or commercial interests of those who provide it’.

Stories aim to be cheap, libel free, safe, and to give readers what they are supposed to want ‘lots of celebrity and tv-based coverage’.

Papers ‘have succumbed to their own internal celebrity culture of columnists, most of whom make no attempts to report on the world in favour of sermonising about it’.

Usually such columns are hung on news-related pegs so if the news is a load of churnalism…

Papers get larger and larger with no expansion of resources to do the work of filling them.

I found myself wondering about the effect on us of constant bombardment with misinformation. It seems we now live in a miasma of unreality – we should not believe politicians, we should not believe journalists, we should not believe what we’re told is so. And over and above doubtful veracity there’s so often an offensive tone from journalists, a sort of scornful superiority. In good fiction things might not be literally true, but the way they are told is literarily true. Which enlightens. But misinformation in a hectoring voice…

I suppose disaffection encourages solipsistic retreat: the turning to computer screens, to blogs, youtube and the karaoke mess on the ever growing world-wide-web.

I link up to this anarchy, to this interactive con. I quite like random blogging into the blue. But I have assiduously kept to a rule with my blog: print nothing out. My blog has no corporeal shape. It exists only in cyberspace. It is not for publication. Pull the plug and it’s gone. Which is no bad thing. And at least it leaves the trees in peace.