I came to Sarasota, FL last Thursday after a boring but not uneventful drive from the frozen north. What made it uneventful was that in South Georgia one of my rear tires blew out. I pulled off the highway and stopped on the shoulder and asked myself what do I do now? I was just north of the little town of Cordele, GA and about 300 miles from my final destination and I figured that the little emergency spare (buried under all my belongings in the trunk) would not be adequate for that journey. So I pulled out my trusty cell phone and asked Siri to find tire service folk in the area and in due course he/she/it advised me about a company called A and D tire services in Cordele; even calling them for me. When the gent who answered the phone finally realized that he was dealing with a geriatric incompetent, he established where I was, told me to stay put (not that I had any possibility of leaving), and said he would send his helper to sort me out. After about 20 minutes of my doing nothing this venerable pick-up truck arrived, driven by a young, strong-looking African American who introduced himself as JB and who proceeded to take off the wheel and remove the damaged tire and replace it with a reconditioned one. In the process he used tire levers that dwarfed those that I had used for my bike tires when I was a lad. In the bed of the truck was a gas-powered air compressor which pumped up the replaced tire in no time. He even had a little credit card reader in his cab, and in less than one hour from making the call I was back on the road, and everything with the exception of the compressor and the payment was accomplished by the skill and the muscles and the levers of JB. I felt that I was witnessing a microcosm of the building of the pyramids!

And so later that day I arrived in Sarasota and proceeded to move my stuff into the house that Alex had found for me. Next morning I took a trip to the Comcast office to get cable TV and internet connected since there was none of such in the house. The good news was that this would be done forthwith; the bad news was that the set up would need a tech to visit and so the forthwith would not be until next Wednesday, five days hence. Today is Tuesday and so I have now suffered four of those five interminable internet-free days and I am almost at my wits end! No Netflix, no English Premier League, no PBS News Hour, etc, etc.

How did it come to this? My contemporaries and I and our children grew up and thrived without internet or cable TV or smart phones or computers, so how is it that I become so discombobulated by a few days of i-privation? I suppose it can be put down to the old maxim of “what you never have you never miss!” I imagine that there are some, such as Donald T. who would feel the same way as I do now if Twitter disappeared, but I have never stooped to Twitter so I cannot say. There are those among you who might be thinking “Well, he has his bloody iPhone why does he not use that to access the internet!” And you would be right, but streaming movies and soccer games gobbles Gigas like crazy and the screen is so damn small!

Have you noticed that Bah! Humbug! time is just around the corner?

Enjoy the Solstice.