Vera

I guess I mentioned that I dropped my almost new Iphone onto the tile floor and fractured the glass face.  It didn't shatter, and as a matter of fact sort of created a spiders web, a rather beautiful spiders web of cracks through which I must look to see the various and sundry things one must push to operate the damn thing.  "Various and sundry things" will clue my reader into the fact that I am pathetic when it comes to technology.   I make no apology; I am a writer, a relatively well known classicist.  I don't have to know how to operate a super complicated telephone when all I want is to dial a number, send an email, and nowadays, Oh, Lordy, how I love it, to text.  I remember a few years back everyone was on about teenagers texting.  Now I see why.  Smart teenagers!  It's really the only way to communicate if you ask me.  This Iphone just got a new innards, system #something or other, and it had to be downloaded.  This is the second time in as many months I think.  And now the telephone every time I want to do anything find out the weather, look up a friend's address, and so on and so forth, a little box appears and says "you are doing this the [old, stupid] way, press such and such a button and you can learn the far more efficient way."  The manufacturers they are  daft if they think I am going to master some new way even more complicated.  It's enough I can handle the phone without dropping it all the time.  It is too big.  When you take hold of it the hand grips the beast and the fingers and thumb naturally and I do mean naturally fall to the spot where the buttons are that control loud and soft and the result is that I am always turning off the sound just by taking hold of the thing.  I was too embarrassed by doing this at first but have since learned that lots of people, their fingers fall there and they silence the volume.  And they laugh self consciously as though this were amusing when in fact it is an outrageous dysfunctionality created by a corporation that at the same time is pocketing untold billions.  But don't get me started.. . . .

People will note a tone that says Newcastle on Tyne.  That's because I have been watching "Vera," the detective story on the telly, and it's set there and they all talk like that.  Can't escape it, love.  Get's under your skin, most of all the extraordinarily beautiful landscapes and seascapes and old stone houses.  And what's more the actors are all--well, most-- so physically attractive, the most of them, yes, definitely, e.g., the new coroner, a brown skinned beauty with coal black eyes and impudent lips--they don't cast guys like him in the States .  Quite a collection, innit?