You can do it...You can. You know you can...Keep going....Hold that contact steady, it's just a few minutes I want. Enough time for the jack to stay in the socket and give me some juice to quickly pen something...

My laptop is near death. CD Drive gone, battery popped, can't keep a power connection longer than a couple of minutes. It's this that's dried up the blogging stream. But that's only part of it; my obstinacy, my pig-headedness, my refusal to accept that laptops can wear out - I've got this embedded Northern got-to-get-value-for-my-money trait, that's the real problem.

I patch this thing up, the virtual skin and bones it now is, and throw it back over the parapet, wheezing, coughing cyber blood, back into the fray. Then the merest knock and it's on the floor, like now. Low battery signs firing off like Roman Candles.

All the computer voodoo I know, I've tried; I've used every known imprecation, along with some yet to be classified; begged it with more feeling than a contrite husband. Nothing. It's fading before my eyes. So I bought a new one. "The laptop is dead. Long live the laptop". Er no... I muddled my address up on the online ordering form...! How...please don't ask. Enough that I did.

The revenge of the incumbent laptop. The bitten bites back...