We missed the sign directing us to the hospital car park and instead found a car park on a bit of wasteland where a polite and friendly man took our £5. I don't know whether or not it was a legal car-park or something similar to that urban myth about the bloke outside Bristol zoo but I trustingly (and, as it turned out, correctly) assumed the car would still be there and intact on our return.

We took an impromptu and self-guided tour around the hospital as we tried to work out which building we wanted and where the main entrance was. Initially we went to the wrong ward and got bemused looks when we asked for Mrs The Aged.

My inner pedant didn't like the tautology of "this area is reserved for NHS staff only" in the restaurant and practically suffered apoplexy at a sign offering a special deal on "boxxed" [sic] meals, but my inner geek was quite excited at the lifts. Rather than "up" and "down" buttons in the lift lobby, you select the floor you want and are then told which lift to get into. Quite strange getting into a lift and not having any floor buttons to press.

There was a poster on the wall of the bay where Mrs The Aged was that showed the day's date and weather. Like the sort of thing you get in primary school. Probably quite useful for people who are a bit confused* after accidents or illness, or have otherwise lost track of time. Would have been so much more useful had anyone actually bothered to update it from the previous day.

*Like the lady in the next bed who was trying to contact her husband who had been dead for forty years. I don't mean with a seance, I mean by asking the nurses to phone him to let him know where she was.

Anyway, Mrs The Aged was cheerful and in good spirits and hoping to be released discharged soon. The Aged is hoping it will be a bit later as, although he is happy to provide assistance while she is incapacitated, he would rather do it his way than be told to do it her way.

I was on a training course* for a couple of days last week so had a train trip to Reading - or the big building site, as it would be better described. You know how a child might build something with Lego, then knock it down and build something different? That's Reading - except it is real buildings, not Lego ones.

*My preconception of the product I was being trained in had been "it can't be difficult if J can use it, as he's an idiot". Nothing on the training course caused me to change that preconception.

I occupied my journey in by pondering various rail-related questions such as "why do rail ticket use a completely different abbreviation for months than the rest of society?", "would it be acceptable to shove a mobile phone up the owners arse when it is used in a 'quiet carriage'?", "why do people sit on the outside seat when they know the train is going to be full?", and "is that Victoria Coren-Mitchell over there?" It wasn't, but she did have a similar supercilious manner of looking down her nose.

Social awkwardness on the way back as a colleague was also going back to Basingstoke so it would have been rude not to walk back to the station together and travel on the same train. Except this colleague hardly ever speaks and I started to think "this would be more enjoyable if I were on my own".

The training centre didn't provide food (except biscuits and lousy vending machine coffee). I was getting quite peckish towards the end of the first morning, and the fact that the example database we were looking at was a list of recipes didn't help. The writing on the packet of sandwiches I bought for lunch suggested "spoil your taste buds today". I assume the writer of that line didn't appreciate that spoil can mean ruin as well as treat.

On my way in one morning I read about a new compilation album that might have been enjoyable. I checked it out later but I like fewer than 50% of the tracks and already have most of those that I do like. Worst of all, it includes two Taylor Swift tracks which is excessive by a count of at least two. One of those was "we're never ever ever going to get back together whinge whinge whinge". Come on, no compilation album deserves that. I'd rather hear a track by Dido.

My home internet stopped working last week. Luckily my ISP sets up public Wi-Fi spots from other home networks using the same ISP so I still had some access. The connection kept dropping but eventually I worked out that I need to keep a browser window open, as that was where the user credentials were stored.

I originally thought that my router was OK and was connecting to the internet by another phone line. Once I twigged that this was both rubbish and impossible, and that it was my computer that was connecting to a different router, I rebooted the router and all has been OK since. Coincidentally, I used this same technique to successfully restore internet access at The Aged's yesterday.

A new sub-clause of the Ruby Law of Traffic Delays is that "when Ruby is delayed and/or forced to take a diversion on his way to/from work, a similar delay or diversion will occur on his way to/from work within a week". A sub-clause of that sub-clause is "even if he takes a different route".