I had this reputation at school for being good with computers. It’s possible I had other reputations, I don’t think I was especially noticed for anything, but I had this computer thing and I was fully immersed in the lie. Back then, I was the drama nut I still am, but I’d been laughed at by my careers teacher for wanting to write, so I briefly dove into this computing thing I was seemingly good at.

Honestly, you’d be as shocked as I was to learn that how crap at this I was. Even Systems Analysis, which sounded to me like detective work, seemed to be so far beyond me that I could not see it was beyond me.

But anyway, there was briefly coursework before my school — not what you’d call in a class of its own — decided to abandon its O-Level computing because it didn’t have staff. I remember so visually the moment that the teacher came in and decided to tell us by starting with a question. Who wants to do O-Level computing? he asked. Maybe because of the aforementioned lack of a decent teacher, quite a few people put their hand up. You’re in luck, then, he said, because we’re cancelling it.

I remember even more red-faced angrily visually the face of a woman in the row ahead of me when I objected. “We voted!” she said. “Bullshit,” I wish I’d said.

Whatever I did say, I would not allow the school to kill off the one exam I had a chance of passing, so the fight began. And actually it ended quite soon after when it was arranged that I’d sit the exam at some other school. I want to say night school. Can’t remember.

But the reason this is on my mind now is because of the coursework. I wrote a noughts-and-crosses game on an RML 380Z and the thing of it was that it drew the board instantly — in a few minutes. That’s how I pitched it, that I’d got this wretched machine to ta-daa the board instead of making us wait, watching as it drew a lot of white blobs in a row. It was still drawing them, still being as slow, but I found how to make it hide all of that until it was ready, and then ta-daa.

I hope I at least gave my teachers something to look at. A splash screen. Anything. Something. But I expect I didn’t and instead the ta-daa would come after minutes of blank, black screen that showed only the reflection of people edging to get away.

So it was instant, but it took a long time.

And yesterday, I switched to a faster way of producing a podcast and it is definitely faster, it is unquestionably the way I should be doing this particular show, but it took me three hours longer than the old, slow way.

That meant I worked for 16 hours yesterday, and as it happens did so on about four hours interrupted sleep. There was a point when I found out that one version of the podcast had inexplicably gone wrong, every track and everything on every track was randomly out of step. Then there was a point where I did have to bounce it back to Logic Pro because I’d cocked up something else — and first Logic wouldn’t open, then it insisted on looping only the opening eight seconds of that audio.

I tell you, I came close to crying with tiredness.

But that show is about an hour and forty minutes long, and by tomorrow it will have been released and then listened to by thousands of people. Hang on, if only one thousand listen, that’s 1,667 hours of listening to what took me 90 minutes to record, then an admittedly ridiculous five hours to edit. If I hadn’t been so tired as to be barely functioning, it would’ve been so much faster but still, a few hours for me becoming at least hundreds of hours for other people. I like it.

None of them will know, nor should they ever even have a stabbing guess in the dark, that the show took me as long as it did. It’s there for them instantly, it just took a lot of minutes to be instant.

Time is an illusion, you said it.