Sun, sand and sangria

Well plenty of sun, but none of the other two... We were too far from the beach to care. And my medical condition precludes any alcohol, no matter how much like gnat's wee it tastes...... Y'see, I have just returned from a wonderful two-week break in Spain with my family, where I did absolutely nothing. I simply rested, ate, slept and ... rested some more. I needed it after the hospital food and all the nasty things I had injected into me, one way or another.

The villa was great (and the picture above is genuinely one I took on Day 6). But shock horror! There was no satellite TV (indeed no TV at all) for the first week of our holiday, after the Spanish authorities pulled the plugs on what turned out to be an illegal operation by some UK firm to provide satellite TV including Sky and Setanta channels (allegedly). Even worse was to come. There was no Internet access either. I tried. Believe me, I tried. After several fruitless attempts, I gave up and learned to forget work, my e-mails, the news, in fact everything I had left behind in the UK. In the end it was a blessing in disguise, I can tell you.

At first I suffered withdrawal symptoms. I went through a kind of cold-turkey rehab. I had to be locked away in a darkened, padded room where I was hosed down on a regular basis. Gradually I was weaned off the lines of poke. Painfully I learned to do without the regular (web) hits. My twittering vanished to nil. My blogging was reduced to zero. My FaceBook activities were ... nada. No telephone calls, text messages, or anything. No zapping around on the 750 sat channels. Just the sun, the pool, and total relaxation.

Well, here I am back in the UK and there are 195 e-mails, too many text messages and FaceBook messages to shake a memory stick at, and I won't even begin to talk about how many wiki page messages there are waiting for me to address. I may stop, but my digital life goes on... and on... and on... and...