The misfortune that set all this off was the day I was coming back from Nath and Fab's wedding in France. The Eurostar broke down and it sat in a French siding for four hours before reversing back to Lille where we had to wait for a replacement train. Eventually the new train arrived, devoid of refreshments. We arrived, starved, six hours late in London.

Exhausted and emaciated, I took a taxi home, eager to snuggle under a nice, warm duvet and sleep off the day's horrors. Upon arriving at my flat, I found my front door had stuck. Pushing it harder, I stumbled into my flat to discover that my bedroom ceiling had fallen in. A slowly leaking water pipe had bourght the ceiling down and left the flat awash with evil-smelling water. I was up half the night, squelching around trying to rescue my computer and other belongings from the disaster zone.

I set up camp in the kitchen and slept with my head next to the oven for a fortnight - handy if I decided to end it all (shame it's electric).

After the landlord fixed my ceiling I was able to move back into my bedroom and clear up the devastation. Disaster struck once more, however, when I plugged my scanner into the wrong transformer and fried it with 30 volts. I then spent the next month on the phone to Tiny computers (who are useless) trying to arrnange a replacement. This meant losing my sanity in a maze of £5-a-minute helplines talking to clueless bimbos who kept telling me to phone another number. To be honest, my warranty doesn't cover crass stupidity, but somehow I managed to blag a new scanner.

Unfortunately, their first attempt to replace my allegedly faulty scanner was to send me a replacement plug. Yes, despite my detailed descriptions, they thought I just needed a new transformer. Once more into the endless bimbo helplines, I finally (after a lot of persuasion) managed to get them to deliver a new scanner on Xmas eve. When I finally got around to testing it, the new scanner proved to be faulty: it could only scan its own internal cicuitry, not a photo. Yet again I found myself talking to the Tiny Bimbos until I finally got a new scanner.

Then the speakers stopped working. I bought new ones.