Exercising and Exercised

 I've been uncommonly busy lately, and am just back from a few days in Worthing – not on a lonely impulse of delight but, as ever, on family business. There was some horrendous weather down there, as elsewhere – sheeting rain, howling wind, hail, the works – but also what the weather people refer to as sunny intervals. Indeed, this morning in the little park where I was doing my daily exercises (an improvised combination of xi gong and pilates with a dash of yoga, if you really want to know), I saw a couple of Speckled Woods enjoying a patch of late sunshine. But what has been exercising me, to a deeply tiresome extent, is mobile phone technology, which seems to be getting ever more annoyingly unreliable. I have two phones – a 'smart' iPhone and a 'dumb' brick phone, which I recently upgraded. The latter kind of phone is, I gather, becoming increasingly popular as people abandon the over-sophisticated smart phones and go back to basics. I entirely sympathise, as it seems that the more sophisticated they get, the less reliable they become. I have certainly had plenty of problems, especially when trying to use my iPhone as what it claims to be – a phone. Partly this seems to be a result of living in what locals refer to as 'the Lichfield nexus', this being a town with notoriously patchy network coverage, despite a plethora of masts in the vicinity (half of them, I'm told, not working). By and large, my dumb phone is more reliable, but it also lets me down from time to time – and through most of my stay in Worthing it proved all but unusable, either for phone calls or simple text messages – not that the iPhone was any better. All of which makes me wonder – wasn't this mobile phone technology supposed to make communication easier, connecting us instantly and smoothly from wherever we are to whoever we want to talk to? It seems to work that way in many parts of the world, certainly most of Europe, but not in this country. Is it just me, or is it yet another sign that, as has been widely noted, Britain doesn't work any more?
Confirmation of the latter was provided on our return journey from Worthing, when we arrived at Euston to find that, owing to 'an incident' in Bushey, no trains were running on the Lichfield (and beyond) line – a situation that pertained for most of the day. On the train to Derby (which we were obliged to take, at considerable expense, if we wanted to get home at all), an elderly gentleman remarked that he had made his way by train East to West across the whole of Europe over the pervious few days with every train running on time to the minute, no delays, no cancellations, ample seating, etc, etc. Such stories are all too familiar. O Albion – what happened?