European Vacation

Day-by-day of a British family's Great Big French Holiday:

DAY 5 - I am getting fed up with the people in the holiday flat upstairs. They are very noisy. They are Germans. Of course this latter detail is quite irrelevant and I am determined that neither I nor my family should stoop to clichéd, Sun-reader style discriminatory name-calling based on the family’s innocent nationality.

After dinner that evening, while the nazis upstairs are goose-stepping around in search of lebensraum, I decide to drown out the din by seeking solace in electronic entertainment. With some forethought, I had brought my laptop, a Blu-ray player and some movies in my hand-luggage - I had no time for pre-ripping, unfortunately. My family settles down surprisingly comfortably in sight of the MacBook as I slot in a copy of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Five minutes later, I am still fiddling with the bloody thing to make it work. Mac Blu-ray Player is refusing to play the disc because it can’t reach its authentication server. In the end, I manage to get a mobile phone connection by reaching out of the kitchen window, enabling 3G and establishing a private hotspot, connect to it from the laptop and eventually persuade Mac Shit-For-Brains Blu-ray Wank Player to do what the arse-munching program is fucking supposed to. In the meantime, my kids have dashed back to their rooms and are sucking my data roaming tariff dry by logging into the hotspot and checking their Facebook accounts.

More funny stuff here.