I'd like to apologise for the fact that this website disappeared from the Internet for approximately 30 hours yesterday.
The fault, dear Brutus, lay not with any incompetence on my part, but with our friends at OpenReach, the UK's networking infrastructure people. One of their sub-contractors was performing maintenance at the manhole about 300 metres from our house and, at almost the stroke of 9AM Friday 29th August, managed to dislodge our fibre connection whilst doing whatever it was he was originally contracted to do.
It took a visit to my ISP's high street shop, a subsequent 30 minute inane phone call with a support desk person, and -finally- a 2 minute trip to a website to book a visit from a new OpenReach engineer for the next day (which is actually pretty impressively fast as these things go). Adam duly turned up at noon today, immediately located the problem and spent the next hour fixing it (accidentally breaking someone else's fibre connection in the process... but he fixed that within minutes!). Happily, we are now back on line and all is good with the world once more.
Normal service should be resumed, therefore... at least until someone else needs something fiddled with in that pavement service-hole!