Comic Cuts - 16 June 2017

After a couple of slow and steady days I had a mare of a day on Wednesday which has rather thrown the whole week out of kilter. I'm off to visit family today (Friday) and Thursday is usually the day I spend writing the Comic Cuts column, cleaning up a selection of random scans and also writing the feature that is posted on Saturday (the latter often spills over into Friday and, if it involves lots of research, I'll often spend Sunday finishing it off for the following week).

So I only had three days to pack the paying bits of work into...

... and everything was going OK until Wednesday morning, when I woke up to no internet access. Reboot the wireless box. Internet returns... for about three minutes. Reboot the wireless box. Internet returns... this time for five minutes. Reboot the wireless box. No internet. Reboot the wireless box. Internet returns for three or four minutes.

And this has been the situation since I woke up. It's now ten o'clock on Wednesday evening and I rebooted the wireless box eight minutes ago. It died almost instantly. I can keep writing because Blogger allows me to work offline, but I can't save what I'm writing. All I can do is keep going and hope that, when I reboot the wireless box again in a couple of minutes, the connection to the internet will be stable enough for me to save the changes I've made.

So here I am, writing this on Wednesday, working on the theory that if I get this out of the way I may be able to catch up on the paying work tomorrow. If—and at the moment it's a big IF—the internet connection is stable. This has happened before with Talk Talk. Last time this happened, I phoned and was sent a new connector to plug into the phone socket. Since the connector was never the problem, I can't say I understood why. Now I understand why... the guy I spoke to had no idea what was wrong, so he sent me the new connector so that he could say that some action had been taken to resolve the problem. I really can't recommend Talk Talk to anyone. Since starting this paragraph, I've rebooted the wireless box twice.

And now it's Thursday morning. I eventually had to give up trying to write the column last night because the connection to the internet was so unstable I couldn't upload any images. The only positive that I can take from the problems I had on Wednesday is that I cleaned up quite a few covers.

I was saddened to hear that Alan Austin died in May after a long battle with cancer. Alan was a very active member when British comics fandom took off in the 1970s, publishing a great many fanzines and the first British comic book price guide. He was also a book dealer of note. I probably first met him at Westminster Comic Mart, but after moving to Alan's home town of Colchester, I would occasionally bump into him shopping or trawling around the charity shops. Oddly, I saw more of him than ever when I was doing research at the Family Records Centre in London, as, to get there, I had to walk through Exmouth Market, where Alan ran a shop for a few years.

Alan had written a book about his experiences which I believe will be published shortly.

And as I'm seeing red at the moment, what better theme to choose for our random scans than 'red'.