I decided to pop into the grandly named "Waterloo Centre" to check out options for the PC yesterday and today.

It's just a basement hidden from public view that is rented out to various Russian businesses such as hairdressers, gherkin purveyors and the like. It used to be where the apparently Chinese Mr B, the dodgy (but extremely good) computer man used to run his shop. Mr B moved on to other things (prison?) and was replaced by someone else who I only briefly saw but who R did business with. He has now been succeeded by V who, surprise surprise, seems to be Russian. Computer talk can be pretty incomprehensible at the best of times but I think V and I reached new depths of incomprehension.

It wasn't so much a language thing as a brain thing. He seemed to take the second third of one of my sentences and mix it with the first third of the next sentence and chuck in a whole load from somewhere else. I left feeling totally confused.

Despite that I took the machine round to his stall at R's prompting this lunch time. I'll probably pick it up on Saturday and find he has converted it into a vacuum cleaner that sings.


Tomorrow I progress to Step 3 of my treatment. This is the nicotine absorption equivilant of getting into a lift with someone who smoked a cigar at breakfast.

It looks like I might be having my second test a bit earlier that originally planned. Which can mean only one thing- beer.