Wednesday night get on my bike to cycle home and find that I have a flat tire. I walk home and fix the puncture later on that evening. Thursday morning I’m on my merry way.

Thursday night I cycle home as usual. Then just as I’m serving tea I hear a very loud hissing noise from the other room. I race in there wondering what on earth is making that noise only to see the same tire going from full pressure to flat in less that 30 seconds.

Later on when I have a look no air is escaping from around the edge of the patch – the usual culprit. But the patch itself has a very conspicuous bulge running down the middle. I’ve never seen that before!

That’s more or less the error message I got some time in February. I was sat at my computer doing some work with a remote database while at the same time catching up on Life in Cold Blood on the BBC’s iPlayer when bang, it all came to a halt and timed out. No internet connection.

I couldn’t get Sully to reconnect that evening so I called the support line at Zen, my ISP. No problems at their end. In the end I decided that some part of the hardware on Sully had died, and so grabbed a spare Netgear router from Dad that he wasn’t using. I had been running a low quality cable from the master phone socket to Sully, and while on the phone to Zen they did mention my connection speed was fluctuating. So I took the opportunity to do some recabling and place the Netgear next to the master socket and run a proper network cable back to the server (and from there to the rest of the house).

It worked first time, and at the time lead me to conclude that Sully had indeed had a hardware failure.

Fast forward a few weeks and I decide to tidy up the old cable – only to find this. Doh! My landlord will get getting a call.