A national disaster happens.

The other day I was looking in my Guardian Style Guide and found out that cement and concrete are distinctly different things. Perhaps everyone knew that cement is an ingredient of concrete and that a cement mixer should be called a concrete mixer, but I, for one, did not know that. I feel much smarter already despite being only a short-term owner of the G-Style Guide.

I have also been thinking recently about words that really shouldn’t exist – someone was talking to me the other day about the vapid pointlessness of ‘embarcation’, and the equally-useless-but-only-validated-by-the-presence-of-its-opposite ‘disembarcation’. Why can we not just get in and out of shit, you know?

But what got me admiring my Guardian Style Guide today particularly was that it was such a delight to have some paper on which I could build a foundation of existence. The internet broke at work – it was a national disaster, I might add, caused by a fire in Birmingham which sent BT into a terminal tailspin and left us cast off from the entire world for literally a couple of hours.

I just didn’t know what to do with myself – it was surprising even to me how much I rely on the internet to scratch the itches of thought that pop in and out of my head. If I don’t know something it is momentarily upsetting to me until I can google it and 30 seconds later rest in a post-coital-esque glow of knowing satisfaction.

The internet giveth and the internet taketh away. I might just have to buy an emergency encyclopaedia for those moments when it’s not working though…