The first thing people noticed was the bounced emails, then the web site had vanished and it was nigh on impossible to contact either Elaine or myself via mobile phone.  A fair chunk of confusion reigned for a while and most of it was self-inflicted, but not all.

I owe you an explanation.

Rewind to late 2015 when I was asked by a favourite old client to help out with a bit of a crisis which, in 2016 became a plea for a couple of years full time effort to tide them over. This dragged me out of blissful semi-retirement (mea culpa) and it wasn’t until late 2018 that I finally fully retired with the time to retake the artistic reigns again.

But all things Arty were about to deteriorate. Our long-term family home in Wakefield sold very quickly after years of marketing and we were on the move to the most awesome place in Cumbria. Loads of space to indulge our hobbies and in deep countryside amongst fabulous people. Heaven.

That was the good bit.

The art continued to suffer whilst we gradually settled and got things in order, oh, and built the studio from an old barn. So nothing remotely photographic went on. At all.

But the worst part of the countryside is this; it’s a small niggle but it had a huge shadow…. 40 odd years after the roll-out of mobile services in the UK large parts of rural Britain still have NO service. Not even 2G let alone 5G. Guess where we are….

As for a broadband service, BT Openreach do not find it cost effective to provide one worth using in many rural areas but that doesn’t prevent them planning to discontinue phone services as they roll out VoIP. The latter requires a broadband service worth using, so I guess big chunks of rural Britain will just be chucked back into the middle ages as far as comms go. Guess what sort of Broadband service we have…

So as we started to lift our heads above the haystacks, resigned to the sad fact that we couldn’t do zoom calls or hook up with folk using tech, Covid landed with a dull thud, and amidst the chaos our web domain provider didn’t renew our web domain names which was a pity because they were both set to “auto-renew”.

That crashed the email and took the web site down. By the time I realised what had happened the dot com name had been snapped up by Chinese opportunists but thankfully the dot co dot uk one was salvaged. I hope the Chinese consider it cost-effective to hold nigeltooby.com because I don’t want it and was planning to let it go anyways and with a really common name like that I’m sure they’ll have no trouble selling it on for a small fortune…

To cap this car crash, my web hosts in the USA decided to exit the market and were relieved that my site had gone down. I got a link to all my web files on a dropbox and that was it.

Autumn 2021. No web site, no @nigeltooby email and a geriatric broadband service.

…. and then Mr Elon Musk rode to our rescue by providing a stellar fast satellite broadband service at huge cost… but who cares! It took an age to arrive but finally we have it working and the installation is finished.

Now, if folk say that rural isolation means loneliness.. they’ve probably never lived there. The fact seems to be that the more geographically spaced out rural communities are, the closer they are in a personal sense. The community here is close and tight knit but those incomers who open themselves to the community and aim to be a part of it are warmly welcomed.

18 months after landing we threw a party for the people we knew best (there’ll be even more this year!). Nearly 60 arrived and partied into the night. Near the end of the night, the wife of an important local figure whispered in my ear “welcome to the community both”. That signalled our acceptance and it meant a lot to us.

And, from that community, a help emerged with my web site from a top designer from Manchester now living and working locally. His approach was to point me in the direction of the tools I needed to review and maintain the site myself. His guidance through the process was utterly invaluable and I owe him big time. Stand up Dave Kirkwood you star!

So it came to pass that at about 8pm on 7^th April 2022 my redesigned web site finally hit the WWW.

I hope you like it and sorry to have been away for so long – bet you thought I’d died!!