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I wasn't very well yesterday, as evidenced by the fact that I got the Pope's name wrong in the initial version of my blog. But that was just a test to see how many of you are actually reading. It turns out it is one person. Jon Burton. I'm just relieved that I am not doing this for no one.
It also struck me that maybe calling yourself Pope Innocent is actually a comment on the previous pope. Yes I know the last guy wasn't innocent like you'd expect a pope to be, but I am. The last guy wasn't pious. The last guy didn't have a boney face. And so on. If that was the case you'd expect a lot of Pope Notapaedos. The only explanation as to why there aren't any of those is that every pope was one.
We lost the internet some time in the middle of the night - around about four judging by when my security camera emailed me to let me know it wasn't working. It's a problem with the connection to the house and it only seems to be affecting us, so we need an engineer to come to sort it out. Amazingly I managed to sort this out almost instantaneously online and they are sending someone tomorrow morning. I had envisioned a week or so of the nightmare of being offline, but BT have come good.
I probably made this observation when we moved in to this house and were waiting to get online, but it's crazy how almost totally reliant we are on the internet. We can't watch TV, we can't charge our car, the doorbell doesn't work, I can't ask Alexa to set a timer so I can heat a pain au chocolat for my daughter(I mean, come on, is it even worth living if you can't do that? What am I supposed to do? Guess how long to leave it in? Use a watch? Set the timer on the oven? I don't know how!). Also possibly more crucially, it means I can't do a big part of my job. Luckily I had no remote interviews in today and I am taking a holiday from snooker and puppet shows. But come on. Do you want to live in a world where I can't make Twitch of Fun? And that you can't watch it? Or get access to my daily blog, Jon?
Sure I could tether off my phone for the easy stuff and I also found a corner of the living room where I could pick up the EE network from somewhere (which I can access as a BT customer - honestly I've given them a lot of shit in my time, but credit where credit is due - though admittedly I have another modem thing that is supposed to work if the internet goes down, but I could never get that going in spite of following the fairly simple instructions), but the kids were bamboozled by stuff just not working as normal. Weirdly Ernie was able to watch Captain Underpants on Netflix - has he somehow downloaded that? Surely you can't download stuff from Netflix. Otherwise you'd just download everything on it and leave. And how did he have the foresight to use that function if it exists? Does he have a magic ipad?
We got through the nightmare somehow. Hopefully it will all be sorted tomorrow. Will someone please think of my daughter's pain au chocolat?
My illness continues - not debilitating enough to mean I can go to bed, but unpleasant enough to be annoying - in a nice twist today, maybe as a result of nearly choking on chocolaty vomit, I completely lost my appetite. This is the kind of illness I like. Most of my most successful periods of dieting start with throwing up and a day where the thought of eating just left me feeling non-plussed is the perfect way to control your calorific intake. I wasn't hungry and nothing appealed to me. I didn't have anything til a late lunch when I thought I'd better eat a bowl of cereal or something. Has my body managed to somehow manufacture Ozempic? Or has it just realised that I've let myself go again and if it doesn't do something about it I am going to die? Make up your mind body, one moment you're manufacturing cancer to try and kill me and now you're trying to encourage me to stay alive. Which is it? Do one or the other you fucking coward.
This week on the Can I Have My Ball Back? tour I am coming to:
Thursday Chelmsford
Saturday Durham
Sunday Newcastle
Still tickets for all shows except Leek (and just released some company holds for that one). Loads of tickets for Lincoln. Birmingham nearly sold out.
All details here.
