I dug out my old iMac yesterday, the Mac I bought when I left Radio Times in 2012, the device I wrote my first book on. And the device that — unusually for a Mac — went very badly wrong around 2019. Give it some credit, I hammered that machine: I seem to write at least half a million words each year so, er, something more than three million went through that keyboard.

No wonder some of the keys are fading away. I don’t mean the lettering on top of the keyboard, I mean the plastic of the keys themselves.

This old iMac has not been switched on since I replaced it back then, and I only got it out today, I only found the power cable, because it truly belongs in a tip but I wanted to check I hadn’t left any important documents on it. Given the state of the machine at the end, it wasn’t 50/50 whether I’d even get it started enough to check for documents, it was 10/90 against.

For some reason, though, everything worked and suddenly I had 27 inches of 2019 in my face. Plans, some of which I’ve achieved. Swathes of details about jobs I’ve now done so long ago that I’ve forgotten them. So forgotten them that you wonder why they had seemed so important, and then inescapably wonder if what you’re doing right now is important either.

It’s only five years since 2019, but this felt like a snapshot from the before times. Before COVID, of course, but longer ago than that.

There are a few audio recordings of me, too, my local recordings done during production of podcasts that no longer exist. That was quite the shock, although I don’t understand why. I even hesitated over tapping the space bar to hear the impossibly young me of a whole five years ago, and when I made myself do it, I heard what did sound like an impossibly younger me.

As it happens, yesterday I produced the AppleInsider podcast and so I’ve been listening to my 2024 voice. I sound tired now. I think I even sound a little defeated in today’s audios.

I don’t recognise the me of 2019. I’m on those recordings talking about subjects that aren’t exactly unknown to me now, but I have to think hard to recall. And what I recall are some of the facts, I’m not getting the reasons I cared back then, I’m not connecting to this stranger.

Intellectually, I can point to things I’ve done since then that I am proud of and that I think are good. That I think are worth doing, that have been worth doing. And at times as I go through the old folders of documents and I’m feeling the width of five years, there is a bit of me that even thinks I’ve put a lot into that half decade.

Not enough, of course. Never enough, I’m afraid.

But what I see as I look at this iMac screen is that regardless of what I do or don’t achieve, time passes anyway. I need to do more, I need to get things done because it’s ticking by like I’m a stranger to it.

I also need to get more sleep.