WHAT was your excuse? Mine was usually something to do with losing my textbook, my essay blew away in a freak wind on the way to school, it fell in the bath or I spilt my dinner on it.

Which begs the question, why was I was holding an English literature essay in my hand while walking to school rather than stuffing it in my satchel, writing it in the bath or putting the finishing touches to it over the dinner table?

Mind you, I surpassed myself on one occasion when I’d run out of yet more implausible excuses – a quick dusting of white chalk dust on my face, adopting a gripping-my-stomach stance and a few groans of “Miss, I’m not feeling very well” and I was off the hook again. Should have got an Oscar for that one.

Yes, it’s homework time again. Or rather, as the term ramps up, the excuses for not having done it are back with us. Teachers, of course, have heard them all and probably spend their breaks chortling in the staff room about the inventiveness of pupils, while at the same time tearing their hair out because if said pupils applied as much thought to their school work as they did to their excuses for not doing it, then they’d all be getting A*s and multiple university offers.

But for anyone who has already run out of excuses less than a month after the start of the new school year, here’s some to be going on with… Computers, or their propensity to blow up, feature strongly these days, as you might expect – one English student sent an email to his teacher with a whole page of unrecognisable symbols and gibberish gobbledegook which he had keyed in very carefully (must have taken him as long to do that as it would have done to do the work in the first place), then said there was obviously a problem with his email account.

And if the computer hasn’t blown up/frozen/I couldn’t get on it because my mum was playing online bingo/my dad was playing Grand Theft Auto, then it’s the internet that was down (more of that later).

I love the kid who told the teacher: “I could only arbitrarily get close to my textbook and couldn’t actually reach it.” But the best of all has to be the argument put forward by one pupil for handing in work after the deadline: “It’s only a day late, and if there is an infinite amount of time in the universe then a day divided by infinity is nothing so it’s actually on time….” Must try that one with the sub-editors when I next hand in my column. You just can’t fault the logic.

• WE love BT! Especially Dave the engineer who was a very nice man. A very nice man indeed….

The couple of column followers I’m fortunate to have will be aware of last week’s angst-ridden rant about being without the internet because of the technical incompetence of our internet service provider (ISP). Well, it got worse. Ten days it took to get the internet back, and then it was only thanks to the lovely Dave who was booked to sort us out in a 90-minute slot and ended up staying more than four hours. That was because he spent half of that time on a three-way conference call between him, BT’s broadband boffins, and those in the Hyderabad call centre operated by our ISP with the audacity to call themselves technical experts.

Through Dave’s sterling efforts we finally got the internet back after ten days of missed business deadlines, regular 20-mile round trip forays to coffee shops so we could send important emails, documents and business reports to clients via public access wi-fi, spending more than £250 on a new router and computer repairs because the Hyderabad lot caused one of our computers to crash into complete meltdown, and more than 21 hours (yes, really) spent on the phone trying to get the ISP lot to pull their fingers out.

But it’s hardly a case of all’s well that ends well – one of our laptops still won’t connect to the internet wirelessly because of the ISP cock-up in trying to reconfigure it I don’t know how many times.

So it’s back to our trusted binary boffins from an excellent computer services company here in York to come and rescue us from the final element of this sorry saga. And we’re swapping to BT as our ISP by the end of the week. Thanks Dave…