That sinking feeling.

A friend on Facebook posted that one of her sons had run up a bill of over £1500 on his iPhone. How do you manage to do that? I wondered. Then I read about an update on the latest iPhone operating system that, unless you tell it not to do so, will decide on your behalf that the internet connection you are using is too slow and switch your phone automatically to 4G and charge you accordingly. Wow! How glad I am not to have that sort of contract. On the one occasion that I inadvertently used up the internet allowance that I have agreed with my phone provider, they sent me a text telling me that was the case and told me how much I might have to pay if I continued using it. So I was extremely careful and waited for my next month's allowance. 

But then, I am not a teenager busily playing games, downloading music and video clips, snapchatting or whatever it's called, and generally being unable to live without being connected. And I say this as a person who checks email and Facebook several times a day, not as someone who never ever goes online! But there have to be limits. How do you cope with unexpected bills of £1500? 

We have managed to get through today without losing power. Phil tells me that there was a brief power cut some time in the small hours of the morning but I was well away in the land of nod and knew nothing about it until I spotted the clock on the electric oven telling strange times. The generator has disappeared and we are now connected to the mains once more but there is still a trench in our garden and a rather large hole in the pavement outside out gate. We have electricity board barriers all over the place, including on our garden path. Quite where people approaching our front door are being diverted to, I do not know. 

According to the workmen who dug the holes and fiddled about with cables and connectors, the problem was probably caused when they built the new houses behind ours and connected them to the mains supply. As I already have some suspicions that the water that has been flowing down the road for months now is not going down the drains because those building works collapsed parts of the drainage system, you can imagine how unkindly I feel towards the company who built the houses. This is without going into the fact that they seem to have been built on what was formerly, I am fairly sure, a flood plain! Such is life. 

I have been reading some material written by the Swedish writer Henning Mankell, who died of cancer in 2014. Writing about his feelings on discovering that he was suffering from cancer, he said that it reminded him of a childhood fear of quicksand. He had heard stories of soldiers inadvertently stepping into quicksand and gradually being sucked down until they suffocated. Later, when he had, as he described it, "finally conquered the urge to give up, to allow myself to be swallowed up into the abyss", he did some research into quicksand. Thus he discovered that the idea of someone being sucked down into quicksand and not being able to escape is a myth; all the stories are fabricated. 

And yet, I remember as a child being continually warmed not to go onto certain sections of the beach of my hometown because I would risk being swallowed by the sinking sand, never to be seen again! How curious!