Cake or death?

I’m not sure if it was some profound philosopher or just Eddie Izzard who first posed the question ‘cake or death?’ but this type of comparative question between two seemingly irrelevant items is one I’ve been pondering quite a lot lately. Living without things that you take for granted it becomes kind of a fun game to choose which you miss most…

• TV or duvet? (duvet)
• Electricity or water? (water)
• Heels or hair straighteners? (tricky one, hair straighteners I think)
• Cheese or yogurt? (cheese)
• Internet or…

Well that is where the problem is (or was if you are reading this before November 2007). Following the low point of the only internet café for 50 miles being struck by lightening came a high of finding out I could get internet at home. But then this week I got cut off for not paying the bill! Now in the UK this would be a relatively simple problem to solve – call the telephone company, give them your address & set up a direct debit – but in Flores it couldn’t possible be that straight forward. For a start I don’t have an address (the one I gave you the other week is my work address). There is no house number or road name, just a district then a series of descriptors: opposite the catholic radio station; where the nuns used to live. And obviously direct debit is never gonna happen – I can’t even withdraw money here on my visa card. So someone from work is gonna sort it out, I don’t know how, I don’t think I’ll ever understand the bureaucratic side of Indonesian.

It’s amazing how quickly the internet has come to dominate western life and how much we have come to rely on it. Like most things, you don’t really realize how important it is to you until you don’t have it. For me here it is a lifeline to the modern world. So if it’s a choice between TV, duvet, electricity, water, heels, hair straighteners, cheese, yogurt or internet the answer for me is simple: internet. (Oh, & I would choose cake over death – but that’s obvious!)