Patientline is the communication system that is installed at each patient’s bedside in the ERI.  It provides a personal telephone number, television, radio – and internet!  Woo hoo!  It took me a day or so to discover the internet function and a little longer to get onto Edubuzz (I like the new look, by the way!) and guineapigmum.  So I saw a couple of good wishes people had put on my blog and it cheered me up.

Once the morphine fog cleared a little, I thought I’d have a go at responding – and then it all ground to a halt.  Interminably slow connection speed, a keyboard with letters that didn’t work, most of the blogs that I read regularly blocked and a brain that wasn’t functioning.  What, I wonder, is wrong with Mother at Large, Not wrong, just different and Reluctant Memsahib? Are they full of scurrilous material, likely to raise the heart rate of patients to a dangerous level?  Anyhow, I gave up and resorted to less challenging pasttimes – the Archers and the insufferably perfect Nigella (although I have made the chicken pie she demonstrated since coming home, and it was pretty good).

I wondered, though, if this is what it is like trying to use the internet in schools.  Slow, broken and blocked.  I hope not.