A donglers life

We have not moved in to an internet cafe, nor a house with anything resembling broadband other than it's giant Sky Sports screen, and the pubs of St Albans are iffy on internet access, and I'm not supposed to be in the pub anyway, so it was very helpful that one of my brothers in law offered me his dongle. I was of course, in dongling terms, an idiot, but as soon as I sat down here and the thing appeared to work I went on Ebay and ordered one of my own, just like his. What I did not realize is that I was suddenly in far more rarefied air than I thought, and his dongle was not the same as that dongle (we'd even started calling it the 'dougal') and that we had entered a world of the highly specialized, who know their dongles. Here knowing your dongle is the difference between driving your Astra and your Porsche. Get caught up with the wrong dongle and you're pretty much FUCKED FOR LIFE. Or so it appears.

In this weeks LRB John Lanchester writes a nice piece on Marx (Karl) at 193, and even he complains that while it may be reasonable to retrain different generations, the same process is tough on a 50yr old welder right now. As it is now, all is melting in to air quite rapidly, and my dongle will not, even when it arrives, be any use at all simply because I really am not in the know. 'You're fucked' my brother said down the phone, probably standing in a nightclub, sipping a mojito, doing his business, Porsche outside, probably with the engine running. Success here, probably like success in Kaliningrad, is dependent on certain kinds of knowledge irrespective of the apparent information. It's good to remember this. It is also worth remembering that Scott had warned me off the dongle even before we left London.

Last night my niece went out to get her hair done at a special night at a St Albans salon. I remember speed hair cutting to disco music in a nightclub in Dubai. It was a particularly gruesome spectacle. The girls all ran to the ladies afterwards screaming as they suddenly looked like Middle Eastern soap stars. My beautiful niece, with her 'prom' (don't ask) in a week or two, found herself, since she took off her glasses, with an asymmetrical bob cut, and now in floods of tears unable to leave her bedroom. Her mum has complained to head office, and they are going to take her down to London to see if they can do something with it like it's ER. What exactly can you do with suddenly asymmetrical hair? The mind boggles. St Albans/Dubai asymmetry. D'Arcy's does Pacific Rim.