How many words?

Apologies for the silence. I’ve been offline.

Turns out, the South African adventure took me to a place with no wi-fi, no internet, and no signal. So, I was out of the twittersphere, disconnected from the email and off the blog. Sort of an enforced cold turkey from my Iphone. The poor thing, it couldn’t find a hint of 3G and it didn’t know what had hit it.

As I had begun to project human emotions onto an inanimate object, perhaps a break was timely.

I have only been an Iphone owner for a month or so but I cannot think of an event that has changed my life so radically.

I have become one of ‘those people’ who bumps into people and objects as I walk along, hypnotised by its screen. It flashes, it beeps, it’s just so darn, well, touchable.

One evening, after one such beep, the boyfriend asked  “Is that an alarm because you haven’t touched it in 3 minutes?”

And then it was gone. I had no idea what was happening in the world outside of the Brown Family Holiday.

Facebook missed me at least. Whilst I was away it was sending me emails (which of course I didn’t receive) telling me what I was missing and encouraging me to come back into the fold. 

And what did I miss? Turns out, not a lot.

So, picture the scene, I’m 6000 miles from home, my contact with the outside world is lying dejected in the drawer, and oh, did I mention – there was no TV.

So what does a family of 10 (aged 8 – 85) do over the Christmas season, without a TV?

Well, we made stained glass windows from quality street wrappers, decked the place in paper chains made of newspaper and even turned the wine boxes into a Christmas tree.

But the thing we did most of all, blog readers, was play charades.

Every night. For hours.

As my 85 year old grandfather dived onto the floor to evoke the word ‘collapse’, I almost collapsed of the inevitable heart attack. So, this is what people did before TV. Seems dangerous.

I’ve been back in the country 4 hours. The laptop is on, and of course I had turned my phone on the moment we touched the tarmac.

But now I know I can survive without her, she’s going off in a moment because I’ve got something very important to do. You see, there’s a Christmas special with my name all over it.

OK team, it’s a TV show. 2 words. First word: Downton. Second word: Abbey.