BT or not BT, encore

Our BT phone line suddenly stopped working. When Holly called about this, she was promised that a technician would come to look at the line in four days. Hours later, the line was working again. In fact, it was ringing every couple of hours to tell me there was a voice message. The message was a BT operator calling to say that BT had taken a report that our phone wasn't working and they were looking into the problem. But until the phone started working, how was I to get the message?

This operator had a lovely Scottish accent, and I played the message three times to hear again how she said “phone.” There's a vowel sound that I can't reproduce, rather like the vowel Canadians have in the word “out.” I used to walk down the street in Toronto trying to say it. “Out and about.” I'm not bad at languages, but there are some sounds that refuse to come out of my mouth.

As for my silence over the last few days, I've had a bout of intestinal distress which left me severely cramped for one day and then exhausted for days afterward. There wasn't much to blog about except for the color of the ceiling I stared at or the programs I listened to on BBC four. (If you're going to be sick in bed, though, do it in Canada or Britain. The radio programming of the CBC and BBC is much better than anything on offer in the U.S.)

Travel anywhere results in swallowing new varieties of microbiology, and relatively innocuous bugs can make you sick if they're new to you. Or so goes the theory. Americans expect to get sick with “Montezuma's Revenge” when they travel to Mexico and drink tap water. But what spirit wants to wreak vengeance upon foreigners in Britain? I blame Boudicca. I am recovering from a bout of “Queen Boudicca's Revenge.”

I am behind on my story writing, behind on my novel chapters, and only barely caught up now with my teaching. Next week, I travel to Germany. I won't be posting much here for a couple weeks.