A privileged position

I've been in a foreign country for the last two days.  A foreign country called England.

In England they speak funny.  They pronounce "SEGA" like "say-gurr" and "alright" like "oohh-wroii-eet".  It can get a little confusing, and at times I felt lost and out of place.

Aiding this feeling of being lost was the dreadful signal strength in Centre Parcs, which is the part of that fabled country that I was dwelling in, for my mobile phone.  Upon arrival I gasped in horror and did waketh my son with a screeching when I looked at my signal bars and found there to be none.

No HSDPA.  No 3G.  Not even a meagre GPRS.

Eventually I discovered an area of signal.  A single inch of space within which a line to the outside world existed. But my attempts at communication were largely met with the response, "your tweet could not be sent and has been saved to drafts."

Obviously I'm exaggerating both the severity of the situation and the effect it had on me but it can be strange to suddenly be cut off from the vast, soul-devouring expanse that is the internet.  When I got home yesterday almost the first thing I did was check my e-mails and browse lovingly through the penis enlargement trials in my spam folder and those e-mails my long lost Uncle Chin-Sung keeps sending me.  He's off his rocker.

Logging on to Xbox Live and playing a game online seemed like visiting a friend you haven't seen or heard of in years and it almost seemed like a joy to see the "you have been disconnected from Xbox Live" message over and over.

Is this healthy?  I doubt it, but we in the west are padded and surrounded with luxuries that people in many other countries can't even conceive of.  It all seems so utterly normal to us.

We switch away from those awful charity adverts that show us just how lucky we are, out of disgust at how different a life can be from our own.  How lucky we are.  I do it to, it's human nature to want to hide from an awful truth.

I'm off to sign up to give money to a charity.  I haven't decided which one yet, but I hear a fiver a month goes a long way for a starving wean in Niger.