Bit of a trauma last night. We bought some new furniture at the weekend that necessitated me moving my PC. Not a problem, as it gave me a chance to take the system apart, dust everything down and untangle all the spaghetti at the back.

Everything went swimmingly, until I plugged everything back in and switched on the monitor. Not a sausage.

I eventually tracked the problem down. I’d plugged the power supply for the monitor into the modem, and vice versa. The plugs were the same, and since both of them were unbranded generic power supplies, there was no reason why I’d know which was which. Even if I saw the problem beforehand it would still have been a 50/50 guess.

The problem is, one of them was a 1A supply, while the other is 3.5A

So I unplugged the modem and the monitor and swapped the cables over. The monitor (thank god) worked fine. But I fried the modem. Bugger.

Only in France

There was a bit of a commotion outside the office today. When I went to look, it turned out it was an office over the other side of the Avenue George V that is on strike, and the noise was the usual picket with megaphones and so on. This is France after all, so there was nothing unusual about that.

Except for one tiny thing. The office over the road is La Croix Rouge Française.

So what, exactly, is the point of them going on strike? Don’t get me wrong – I think the ability to withdraw labour is one of the markers of a civilised society. But surely if you’re working for the red cross you’re not just in it for what you can get – and isn’t there something happening in Asia at the moment that means it’s actually quite important that the Red Cross is working properly at the moment?

As I think I may have written here before, I didn’t like living in Singapore much. After all, the country that gave us the merlion as a national symbol can’t really have too much going for it, now can it? And boy, is it humid. All the time.

In fact, apart from a few colleagues, the only thing I really miss about Singapore is the food, which was fantastic. Although I worked a long way out of town, I had an unbelievable choice of things to eat for lunch – from popiah rolls to hainanese chicken rice to sushi and Korean barbecue to Burger King and Subway. And for the most part, it was very, very cheap. In fact, in many cases it was cheaper to eat out than eat in, given the high prices at the local Westerner-friendly Cold Storage supermarket.

So the food came as a bit of a shock when we returned to the UK. But one day, we sniffed out a fantastic supermarket in Manchester’s China Town where we found quite a lot of the things we were missing.

But with my parents moving from the North West and mostly seeing Sam’s parents at their house in France, that particular avenue is a lot less open to us than it used to be. Somehow the things you buy at the mainstream supermarkets in the UK and France never quite seem to be up to the mark, and the Tang Frères Chinese supermarket in the 13th is, frankly, poor.

So what to do?

Fortunately, as so often, the Internet came to the rescue. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before to look, but after wasting my time with the Wing Yip site (which is very nice but didn’t have precisely what I was looking for, I found the Asian Home Gourmet site. Asian Home Gourmet make the BEST spice pastes for oriental food, and they’re westerner friendly in that they don’t ask for any additional ingredients you wouldn’t be able to fine in your average supermarket. And they’re cheap, too. Even though it costs a whopping US$13 to post to France (but less for the UK, US and a couple of other places), it still works out at about €2 per meal for the 15 packets we ordered.

So right now I’m looking forward to the green curry, hainanese chicken rice, mee goreng, nasi goreng, rogan josh and Thai fragrant stir-fry currently winging its way toward us from Singapore. I shall report on its tastiness later on (although the green curry is one of my favourites and I recommend it without hesitation).

I have a rumbling tummy now…

Yay! I can post pictures to my blog at last. here's one of Isobel wearing a crown she made at playgroup. 

I am very lucky.

I have a lovely wife that I finally appreciate for what she's worth, a beautiful daughter with a sunny disposition (and the ability to count up to 24 in French) and a supportive family. I have a nephew on the way, who will be born at the end of May.

I have a job that pays quite well - especially so considering it's not really very hard work. I get to live within walking distance of my office, which is itself just off one of the most famous and photogenic roads in the world.

I have lived in five countries, and I have friends from all over the world - some of whom I know I could call on if the shit were ever really to hit the fan.

I have no debts to speak of, and I know the value of a dollar. My home is not in any immediate danger of being washed away by floods, and it has an uninterrupted supply of electricity and water. I can read and write and perform complicated sums with the aid of a pencil and paper.

My health is good - although I am protected by excellent health insurance if anything goes wrong.

I think sometimes it's good to remind yourself that however frustrated one might get, things aren't really so bad.

So I spoke to one Swedish person yesterday, and one person that lives in Sweden. The Swede had lost a former colleague in Thailand, who was also a distant relative, and the American guy I know who works in the National Archives in Stockholm went to see a colleague to talk about an email she'd sent him before the holidays, only to find out she's dead.

There are 3,000 Swedes dead. It's incredible to think that the biggest disaster ever to befall the population of a country can happen on anyother continent. But there you are.

It seems everyone knows someone who has died. The Prime Minister, Göran Persson, apparently lost a schoolfriend, and even Princess Madeleine has lost people.

It's only right, I think, that attention should focus on the people that actually live in the countries that are affected. But there's an awful lot of suffering in Scandinavia at the moment, and there are an awful lot of people who died a watery death a very long way from home.