This is not a post about small bits of wood that are useful for starting fires, but about my newly departed Amazon Kindle. I am a great advocate of using the kindle – anyone who has done any sort of travelling usually is. I don’t get the ‘books or e-reader’ argument. They are not mutually exclusive and there is a time and place for both. I love having books around me as well as reading them but the kindle makes it so easy to carry a large number of ‘perhaps’ books easily. I have found a number of authors that I hadn’t previously read via the Kindle Daily Deal email. In this there are a small selection of books available for the kindle for 99p.  I wouldn’t have found either Ben McIntyre or Rosamund Pilcher – two very different and contrasting writers. 

I was mildly surprised to see that my kindle had reverted to the ‘Tree’ screen later last week. This usually only appears when it is updating the software or something.  I plugged it in and the following morning nothing had changed.  I’ve only had this one since late 2018.  I’d had to buy a new one when I left mine on a Singapore Airlines plane to Australia. I wonder what they do with all the stuff that gets left on planes?  
Anyway, back to this one. I checked online and did all the restart things to no avail.  I eventually decided that I probably needed some additional help. I did once have to upgrade the operating system with help from their technical services, so I was hoping they might be able to do something similar this time. I was wrong. I got onto the ‘chat bot’ that may or may not have had a real person on the other end and had to repeat all the things that I had done already. No change. They then said, leave it charging for 40 minutes and try again. I was losing the ability to be even vaguely reasonable by then so I left it overnight – again.

The following day I logged in again and they said they had no record of the previous day’s conversation. After even more of the same nonsense – now doing it all for the third time, it was deemed to be defunct. As it was past its warranty but not very old they offered me 15% off a new one. So far so good. It seems I was this time logged into Amazon.com not Amazon.co.uk which was why they couldn’t find the previous conversation. I really couldn’t face another introduction to the whole sorry process so left it again till the next day.  Yesterday after yet more ‘restarting’ and trials, they asked if I was using the same USB cable that it had been supplied with.  I think they got the message when I replied WHAT? 

I have now a new kindle on order – with my 15% off but feel I have lost at least a day of Yorkshire sunshine in the process. 

To add a bit of calm and to prevent the writing of this raising my blood pressure further, here is a fabulous fungus that we found this morning on the trunk of an oak tree in the local woods.  I have no idea what it is.  It looks like it is made from the same thing as those foam sweets (bananas and prawns) but wouldn’t recommend trying it. If I find out what it is I’ll add it here.  

Also – where have the image captions gone in wordpress – grrrr.