As will every other day for several months, my birthday dawned bright and cloudless and, somewhat annoyingly, at 6:30 am. It’s Saturday so laying around in bed for a bit is quite appropriate, until I try to watch the BBC Breakfast News when the Internet does what it often does – the speed oscillates alarmingly between zero and very fast for a couple of minutes then it fails altogether.

Unwilling to allow me to celebrate a birthday without opening a present first thing in the morning Chris brings me a parcel and a couple of cards; one from her and one from my mum who managed to successfully send it through the post. The parcel contains a beautiful hand-painted tray that will come in handy for eating my dinner off whilst watching “Doctor Who” tomorrow, assuming the Internet allows me to download tonight’s episode.

The Internet returns, so having watched the news a leisurely breakfast is accompanied by the latest episode of “Have I Got News For You” after which we head out shopping; a regular Saturday event. We bounce down the track out of Bingham’s gates after offering cheery waves to several of our guards, to be met by a melee of vehicles on the main road not moving and pointing in random directions. Being the proud owner of a big muscly truck I barge my way through as soon as some movement occurs and we head off to the ring road. Mercifully the roundabout road surface, destroyed by months of rain and hopelessly overloaded big trucks, has been repaired and the huge crater on the ring road (that could have swallowed a small bus) has been filled in so the journey is both more comfortable and far less dangerous today.

Surprisingly the first supermarket  (one of the biggest, which means it's around the size of a modest “Tesco Local”) has almost everything we need, but we still need to go to “Fantu” for a few items. Fantu’s small car park is now half covered in piles of rubble so we have to queue up to get in, past several double-parked vehicles who can’t be bothered to wait for a space and are blocking the road, to the great ire of a bendy bus driver who can’t get through and so leans on his horn. While Chris tries to persuade the fruit and veggie man that buying just one aubergine is a perfectly reasonable thing to do I spot a real and rare treat – a 10-pack (there should be 12 but two have been removed) of 500 ml bottles of Diet Pepsi. I grab them before anyone else can, only to be accosted by a brown-coated gauntly thin employee who looked to be about 150 years old and is greatly concerned about the two missing bottles. He takes me round the back of the staircase where there is a secret supply of bottled beers and we find another pack of Diet Pepsi, this time with a full complement of 12 bottles, under piles of normal Pepsi. Contentedly he accompanies me to the checkout. We pack our purchases into the car and head off to Aba Guben for fresh bread, a burger, a coffee and then home to watch the Russian Formula 1 Grand Prix qualifying. I connect to BBC One, watch David Coulthard and Suzi Perry for 30 seconds when the Internet spikes alarmingly between zero and fast then dies completely. So - plan B. I have a 3G stick for my computer to connect to the Internet but there’s one problem – I’ve not topped up the credit. I pay 1000 Birr a month (£30 or so for 8 GB of download), but I have to use scratch cards and enter the secret number on my mobile phone. Usually I get two 500 Birr cards; once I had a single 1000 Birr card. This time they only had 100 Birr cards so I had to buy 10. Here’s the process – dial 903, listen to the nice lady speaking Amharic, press 1, more Amharic, press 2, more Amharic, enter the number for the 3G card (10 digits), press "#", she reads it back (in Amharic), press 1 to confirm, enter the scratch card number (15 digits), press “#”, she says something then hangs up. Then do it all again. And again. Ten times. It took me a while (felt like hours), I plugged the 3G stick into the computer – “connection failed”. No Internet, no 3G, and no Internet on my phone. So the whole network’s down. No Formula 1. Patience is a virtue; an hour or so later the network’s back and I try again. On the in-house Internet all I see on BBC iPlayer is a spinning pink circle. Plug in the 3G stick, fiddle with the connection (it’s complicated) and at last - success! Good things come to those who wait.

For a birthday treat in the evening we head off with friends to a posh Italian restaurant several floors up a tower block near SIM HQ. We hunt for the stairs – Andy won’t use Ethiopian lifts since he was stuck in one once. Ethiopian menus are often quite amusing and this one doesn’t let us down. The “shrimp cocktail” ingredients are: “Shrimp in mayonnaise, ketchup, cognac, tobacco and Worcester sauce and garnished with chive.” Either a very inventive chef, or they’d misspelled this ingredient:

A great meal, a great birthday, and thanks to all who sent me electronic good wishes.