Luxembourg – Germanyinternetgate

Everything was going marvellously as the train pulled out of Luxembourg, until we started to approach the German border. Then tragedy took place, something went wrong with my phone connecting to Vodafone Deutschland. By something went wrong, I meant everything went wrong and there was no connection at all. There was no wi-fi on the train that I was on either, so for several hours I was totally without mobile data.

I hardly mentioned the situation to Nathan, who managed to get signal on his Nokia 3310, which very much irritated me. But jealously is a very bad vice, so I didn’t tell him that. I turned the phone on and off at least 20 times (my phone, not Nathan’s, although I was tempted to interrupt some snooker game he was avidly playing, like a young Judd Trump), but to no avail. I remained brave, calm and dignified in the situation and tried to forget about the crisis. But I struggled, if I’m being honest.

Fortunately, suddenly when we were in Bonn, around six hours later, the phone signal whirred into action and my e-mails came flooding through. Panic was over and normal service was able to resume, meaning I could go to the pub without fear of missing out on something on-line.