After all the time it's taken me to get back online, I certainly can't claim to be an IT god, but I'm sure my new black beauty of a laptop will soon help me forget about the frustrations of the last 6 months or so and it'll be as if I never went away at all.

I will say this for my enforced absence: I managed to get through quite a bit of reading - a whopping 22 books between mid-August and Christmas, bringing last year's total up to 52. Unfortunately, they weren't all wonderful, but some at least were very, very enjoyable. Some, like Herodotus's The Histories, I'd been meaning to read for years, but never found the time for. So far this year, I've finished four; and I've just started on my fifth (Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall)...but I've got a feeling that now I've got my interwebs back, my reading will slow down again.