Routes and routs

I won’t go through it, you already know too well that deep sinking stab of hopelessness that traverses the entrails and goes on down to the pit of CyberHell when everything ceases to work, on day five, seemingly terminally, for the twenty-seventh time. Settting up a wireless network, that is. But I did talk to a lot of pleasant American teenagers on the helpline, which reminded me that they do not all behave like Friends of Tony. A bit of the Now Show on BBC Radio4 suggested it is OK and funny to be almost racistly anti-American. The sketch was about the new ending to Pride and Prejudice; focus group Americans were to be rewarded for taking part with “three buckets of fizzy lard;” and anyway “what’s the point of testing anything on Americans, unless maybe the ebola virus and cattle prods?” OK, part of me is quite happy about this vaccine against our servility to American culture (people in the UCI in baseball caps eating buckets of popcorn and drinking buckets of Pepsi - mix them together and you get fizzy lard with bits in, after all) and our submission to American political command. But it’s no good. The Americans we have to deal with, as well as the ones we may be related to or have as our friends, are not obese morons. We fool ourselves if we think they are. It is after all Tiny Tony Torture and the vacant blobs filling the space formerly occupied by Labour Members of Parliament who are selling off QinetiQ, formerly the MOD defense research department, to the American Carlyle Group. That’s not the Americans’ fault. No doubt they can only stare in grateful wonder at the compliance of our little Quisling leader (I know T Blair is a six foot something sex god, it’s his moral and intellectual stature that’s so diminutive). But I do wish, to get back to the computer network, that the lads at D-Link would pronounce router right. In English we have two words, rout and route, and the gateway of a network does the second. If, in my case, only sporadically.