Mac

Finding your real calling

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The moment I’ve hit Send on this to you, I am out the door and driving to a school. I go in to schools sometimes as a visiting author and the conceit is that I am there to talk about being a writer, sure, where the truth is I instead make ’em write. I have no intention of telling school pupils about me, chiefly because I already know all about me, I was there, I saw me do it, let’s write something brilliant together.

Only, there’s a small difference today in that the school I’m visiting is a secondary one and although it’s still a writing day, when you’re with people who are soon going to have to pick subjects and choose career paths, there is the question of whether you recommend writing as a career. I won’t discourage anyone wanting to write, but I won’t insist that it is anything other than the greatest job you can possibly have — if it’s right for you. And I will insist, on the slightest excuse, that being able to write is enormously useful regardless of the career you go into.

Be the footballer who also writes and you’ll be able to convey whatever it is that’s apparently so interesting about kicking a ball about. Plus that communication skill – look, you know this already, being able to communicate and convey helps anyone.

Only, I have this week discovered that I’m not supposed to be a writer.

To be fair, I’ve suspected it often and occasionally been told so by a reader.

But this week I got the email from LinkedIn. If you don’t happen to use LinkedIn or if you do happen to ignore its emails, what you may not be aware of is that it will tell you if someone has been searching for you on the service. It tells you specifically so that you will spend money to find out more, but even without doing that, you get some details. Plus it’s rather nice, to think someone out there you’ve probably never heard of, is looking for you.

I write that and it sounds ominous.

But you get the LinkedIn email and it has a subject heading like “You appeared in eight searches this week.” It is quite possible that I even preened.

Only, among the detail that you get, there is this. How they found you. Apparently in my case, none of the eight people sought me out by name, which is obviously fine, and not one of them considered me to be a writer or anything even vaguely approaching that. Instead, all eight found me by a keyword search, which is illuminating.

Because – truly – the words these people used to find me were: “food source”.

Funny, again it’s only when I write that down that it seems deeply ominous.

750

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Possibly I’m wrong here because you do seem more organised than I do, but I am pretty sure you have never counted how many conversations you’ve had with someone. And apparently I have, because it turns out that this is the 750th Self Distract blog I’ve written.

If you’re going to count something, I feel you may as well do it thoroughly so after some poking around, I can tell you something. Over the 749 Self Distract posts up to this one, I’ve written 587,160 words, including several good ones. I mean, I’ve written the word “myriad” and used it correctly 24 times.

Self Distract in any recognisable form started in February 2006, which is frankly another country. It didn’t become a weekly natter with you until after I left Radio Times in 2012 or so.

I’d like to say it’s been an unbroken weekly blather every Friday, but that’s not quite true. The result of the Brexit vote was announced on Friday, June 24, 2016, for instance, and I was too paralysed to move.

Then there was pretty much the whole of December 2017 when my website was broken. But apart from two total failures, then, it’s been every week for a decade, so an otherwise unbroken run of 521 Self Distracts.

Some 500 posts ago, I told myself I was writing this because I missed having the deadlines I did of a TV history column in Radio Times and a DVD review one in BBC Ceefax and BBC News Online. They all seemed to end at the same time and I do miss them, but really I was writing Self Distract to write to you and that’s done me a lot of good over the years.

Often it’s been the one quiet, still moment in my week. In bad weeks it’s been the one quiet refuge. It’s continually been a lagrange point, which is something I apparently first mentioned as being on my mind back in 2013.

Other times what I’ve written here has been indirectly responsible for my being commissioned to write various things. And once it was directly responsible for my being flown to California, where I got to meet a couple of my writing heroes.

But looking back over half a million words, I keep seeing times when I was trying to describe something that I didn’t understand. And the action of trying to describe it to you visibly helped me see what I meant, helped me see why I felt the way I did about something.

Self Distract is about writing, about what we write about, and what we write with when we get around to writing. It is inescapably a journal of what is on my mind, yet it’s not a diary. I am not writing it to me, I’m writing it to you, specifically you, and whether I’ve done that well or poorly, the focus has helped me. Thank you.

Don’t tell

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There is a moment in the 2002 film Kissing Jessica Stein that I think is all the more exquisitely well done because it doesn’t happen.

Helen has placed a lonely hearts kind of ad in the newspaper — this was 2002, there were still newspapers — and has had a couple of phone calls in response to it. So we’ve got how it works, what’s supposed to happen, and we’ve also been set up for half a dozen other issues that will play out over the course of the film, but the kicker is how perfect the setup is that takes us to the point where Jessica phones Helen.

Except she doesn’t.

Or rather, she must do, but we never see it. We are delivered to this moment when the call is certain and then we’re with them on their date. Despite the eleventy billion people telling you that showing something is better than telling it, this film is better because it does not do that.

I wouldn’t know from watching the film, but apparently the budget was very low and very tight. So it’s possible that there just wasn’t time in the schedule to shoot that phone call. But I think it was the decision of writers Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen. They also star as Jessica and Helen respectively.

I do have a thing against characters asking questions in drama, but I’ve not had a problem with showing things instead of telling them. But don’t tell. Don’t show, don’t tell, don’t ask. Not all the time, not when it isn’t necessary.

All of which seems obvious now I’ve written it down, I mean I can see you nodding, wondering when I’m going to get to a point you don’t already know or can’t already see.

But maybe what I’m thinking is that this phone call that we don’t see really works because of everything that leads up to it not happening, and everything that results from it. Much as I just singled out one tiny moment in a film, maybe you just cannot do that.

All of this is on my mind because I’ve just rewatched the film, and I’ve just rewatched it because I read that this year is its twentieth anniversary. There’s a lot being written and said about it, and I can’t decide whether I’m more startled that it’s two decades or that anyone but me knows it.

Kissing Jessica Stein is one of those films – or books, TV, radio, theatre – that intellectually you know has been seen by millions, but it feels like it’s only yours. I’ve never been in a gay relationship, never had the string of bad dates Jessica does, never lived in New York, yet a chiefly lesbian romcom set in Manhattan is mine.

I can see that I am drawn to yearning, I’ve spotted that in other favourites like Hearts & Bones, and I am definitely a romance fan. Even in a comedy, the stakes in a romance are so tall that I think all romances are secretly thrillers.

And some of them have great titles. I just don’t know why I think Kissing Jessica Stein is such a good title, I don’t know why that is what made me watch it on TV close to two decades ago, but I love that I did.

Relax, don’t do it

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I have no clue what you do to relax but that’s fair enough, I don’t have the faintest notion what I do either. Yet for some reason, and who knows why, just lately I’ve been worrying about it. I’ve been conscious that I don’t know how to do this relaxing thing. What with one thing and another, it could be 5am when I start work, then 8pm before I sit down to dinner and I spend the rest of the evening wondering what to do.

I did fall asleep in the bath the other day.

I’m not interested in work/life balance, I don’t see them as two different things because everything I’ve been able to take everything I’ve ever enjoyed and make it be part of my work. Hmm. I am interested in how saying that 5am to 8pm bit sounds simultaneously like a boast and a whinge. Either way, it’s not good, so let me reassure you that the real problem is that I’m getting so little done in that time.

Although this is relaxing me, actually, writing to you right now. You’ve got a look in your eye and I’m warily wondering where you’re going to go with that, but talking like this is definitely relaxing.

Also reading, that’s good. I read a script every day and yesterday’s one was utter bliss. I can’t tell you what it was because I got it through a job I’m doing but it was an 45-minute TV script so, being a fast reader, for about half an hour I wasn’t in my office, I was in Derry in the 1990s.

Just thinking it through, that was also about the 11th hour I’d been in front of a screen yesterday. It’s startling how you can physically be in one place, physically using one Mac, and yet it feels like every hour is completely different. Scriptwriting, video editing, article writing, project management, watching a snippet of TV over a very fast lunch, audio editing, research, and countless conversations over email.

I say countless, the truth is that there isn’t that much, I just don’t count it.

Somehow I also don’t count it as work, nor as relaxation. Maybe I’ve got the wrong idea of what the word means. I might ponder that, although some fifteen years ago now, my therapist told me that I overthink things. To this day I wonder what she really meant.

Maybe I should just relax.

Critical analysis

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I got trolled a little bit this week and the only important point is to stress just how astoundingly tiny that little bit was. I mean, come on, I’m a middle-aged white man, I will never know from actual trolling. Not even when I’m English but just used that American construction, “never know from”.

This is entirely off the point, but there’s just something I like about that phrasing. Also the way Americans might say something “most every day.” Can’t figure out why that pleases me so. I do know, for instance, that I like the word “gotten” because there’s such rage about it in England over what’s seen as the bastardisation of the language — yet in truth the word is British English through and through. It’s just that America held on to it, kept using it, protected it, and somehow we in the UK forgot it ever existed.

Anyway.

I’m obviously thinking about this trolling since I’m here talking to you two days – no, wait, um, nope, can’t be sure: it’s either two or three days since it happened. Might be four: it’s been a long week.

I am perturbed that someone could use my personal email address, the one that I’ll give you if I haven’t already, yet which I never share publicly. But the actual insulting bit, no. Neither now when I am struggling to remember what he said nor in the very moment when I read it, at no point could I manage an entire shrug.

All that happened is that some fella decided to email me to say I am a terrible writer. Finally, I thought, someone who agrees with me.

Yet it was a shitty email in all sorts of senses and I didn’t keep it around to study, but I don’t think a team of linguistic experts would have been able to determine what precisely he didn’t like. I’m saying it was a man although I didn’t register the name, but you know it was a man.

He did specifically mention my blog, but that’s just screwy. This is my only blog, right here, and he definitely cannot have meant this because whether it’s written well or terribly, it’s not written to him, it’s written to you.

So I had a little bump in the road as I read it, trying to fathom what it was about. But if I cannot overstress how little this little bit of trolling was, I also cannot find the words to describe how briefly it was in front of me. I am a fast reader, it was a short email, I took it all in with one glance, registering that there was nothing useful there and blocking the sender before I could even finish thinking the word “tosser”.

Only…

This man decided to write to fill me in on my being a bad writer and it’s that act, that decision, that’s had me wondering. I’ve wondered before of course, whenever you hear of the foul things so many people get sent over social media, but this act of flinging out a quite petulant email put it all back in my head again.

There is not one single pixel of a chance that I would ever email a writer to say they are crap – note, not to say that I think they are, that I don’t happen to like their work, but that they actually are crap.

I wouldn’t do it because I’m pragmatic, I might need to work with them some day. I wouldn’t do it because I’m a professional writer and I know very well what you see on screen or read on paper goes through a hell of a journey to get there and we can never know what has happened on someone else’s journey. And I wouldn’t do it because, I hope, I’m a nice guy.

Yet even though I believe all of this to be true, in all practical honesty, these reasons may not be why I wouldn’t do it.

The real reason might be this: who has the time?

My first broadcast writing

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I may be overstating this. The first time you could ever have heard something I wrote be broadcast was 14 March 1987 on BBC2. It was in an episode of a show called Micro Live which was part of the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project. I am not credited, but as it was live I can also know precisely where I was on that day from 18:25-18:55 or so. BBC Television Centre, which I wouldn’t come to think of as home until just shy of a decade later.

Micro Live that week featured the then-new idea of desktop publishing and at the time I was working for a firm that made one of these DTP systems. You’ve never heard of it. I’ve just sat here for twenty minutes trying to remember it. The world was not shaken by this firm, let’s leave it there.

Whereas it was shaken, according to Micro Live, by Apple. It’s weird now to see that episode and how it would’ve been the first time I’d ever come across a Mac. If one could only realise how integral to your work a box in the corner could become.

As for the other box in the corner, the television, well, I think I’ve left you waiting long enough. I can quote to you my entire contribution to that episode because it is just about exactly half a sentence long. Presenter Ian McNaught-Davis was supposed to say that Apple was the first computer company in publishing and no, excuse me, it wasn’t.

Everything he was going to say about what Apple actually did was true but it was far from accurate to say they were the first.

So now if you should manage to track down an obscure TV show from 31 years ago, you would be able to see and hear McNaught-Davis instead begin his speech with the words: “Of course there were computers in publishing before, but…”

What are the odds that you’d ever be able to check this? Remarkably high, as it happens, because it only requires you to click a couple of times.

For this week the BBC released every episode of Micro Live and all the other shows in the Computer Literacy project online. Every minute of it. Here’s my episode.

Excuse me while I remember being very young and rather nervous but adamant that the script be accurate. Not everything changes, then.

Some day your prints will come

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I’m reasonably sure this is true, I think I’ve got this figured out. Johannes Gutenberg was a wuss. He’s done the sales talk, he’s got the investors, he’s got really impressive and quite smelly equipment and he’s standing there when someone asks if this is the printing press that will revolutionise the world.

And he goes uh-huh. Nods. Gives every impression that the answer is yes, that the answer is definitely yes, this is it, we’re done, I am fantastic and don’t you ever doubt it.

But the printing press doesn’t work.

It never worked.

It did always look like it should if only you had the right toner cartridge. And certainly paper goes in here and comes out there unless you’re doing something very stupid. You. Not it. You.

From 1450 until his death in 1468, Gutenberg covered it up by hand-writing every book in existence. Many, many times. You’ve got to give the guy some credit for patience, diligence and exceptionally clear handwriting, but you can’t give him credit for the printing press because it never bloody worked.

If he were alive today, he’d be so relieved that it was all over. For here’s my printer. I had to search the house for it and I’m only surprised that I didn’t find yours at the same time.

For one brief moment this week, I thought I needed to print out something official. I didn’t, I was able to open the PDF I was sent, add a signature to it and send it back as PDF without taking my hands off my Mac’s keyboard, but for a moment there, I thought I did. So began Day One of the hunt for the printer and later this week on Day 417, I found it up there on a high shelf.

There is a part of me that wants to get it down, to plug it in to the mains and to not plug it into my Mac because it’s supposed to be a wireless printer.

But then the rest of me remembers that the wireless bit was a joke and that anyway, this is a printer.

Printers never work because they never have.

If Gutenberg were alive today, he’d be busted. I’m just saying.

The moving finger types

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I don’t like what I wrote last week. I don’t really like what I wrote yesterday. And I’m coming to regret starting this. It’s just always been a fact of life for me: you do your very best and know that tomorrow you’ll be wincing at how poor a writer you are.

A friend has a regular habit of re-reading his scripts from, say, five or ten years ago, and having a good laugh at himself. I re-read mine and weep.

Only, I was just searching for something on my Mac and I found this.

020502.2235
THE LAST OF THE BLONDE BOMBSHELLS
UK Drama 2100-2235
Impossibly, this is the first repeat for this charming and uplifting Alan Plater drama from two years ago.

It’s long been out on DVD in the US but here, curiously, not so much, so this is a rare and welcome chance to see the reunion of a (nearly) all-girl band.

Judi Dench is a gem as the woman who sets out to find her disreputable pals and maybe recapture their glory days.

Don’t be shocked: they manage it. But the game is in traveling desperately as much as it is in arriving.

If you really know your television drama history then “from two years ago” is enough to pin this text down in time. If you’re not then let me offer you my congratulations and say the clue is in that string of numbers at the top. That’s the instruction to BBC Ceefax’s systems that the text should be removed at that date and time. It should go off air at 22:35 on 02/05/02.

That’s 2002.

I wrote that 15 years ago.

And it’s not bad. You’re too young to remember Ceefax so let me explain that it would’ve been tricky to get one more letter, let alone one more word, into the page that text went on. That was the limit of a TV preview and actually of any writing on Ceefax at all. You could have multiple pages but readers would not necessarily see them in the right order so every page had to stand on its own.

So, given that it’s so very constrained in space, I read that text and think it does the job. Tells you what’s on, tells you some news about it and it gives you the plot as well as clearly being a recommendation.

Plus it’s got a bit of bounce to it.

That’s the element that gives me some pleasure. I also get some from the phrase ‘travelling desperately’ which I think works even if you don’t know it’s a quote from another Alan Plater drama. (Misterioso, if you’re wondering. My favourite.)

So I’m willing to tell you about this because my cold writer/producer’s head sees that it works and is no cause for weeping. But I want to tell you about it because of the way it just popped up while I was hunting for something else. Like a little peek into the past. An unexpected window into what feels now like a very different world and a very different me.

We think of online writing as transient and it’s true that all my Ceefax pages vanished the day after they were aired. Most of my writing is already long gone and usually not remembered but this morning a shard of it came back to poke me in the eye. Only because it was written on computers. I have a shelf of paper notebooks I used to use but I never look at them and I can’t read my own handwriting. Whereas a gallon of Ceefax writing just came back as if I’d typed it today.

I have no idea why I’ve still got this text on my Mac, especially as I didn’t get this machine until ten years after I wrote that. I am coming to see why my hard drive is so full, mind.

I think for once that I’m glad it’s there. I’m glad I can see that I wasn’t dreadful. The fact that I wrote around 16,000 pages of BBC Ceefax has come up quite often for some reason and now I think if they were all like that, I’m okay with it.

The gigantic majority were written in BBC Television Centre, typing directly into the systems there, so I don’t have even a significant fraction of the text on my Mac. But I have some from when I would be working at home and delivering copy: I think I’d send in a week’s worth of previews and reviews at a time. I feel sorry for the poor sod who then had to copy and paste them in, but I suppose I did that for other people too.

Ouch. I’ve just read a piece in the same document, a TV preview of some football thing.

040502.1800
THE FA CUP FINAL
BBC1 1210-1725/Sky Sports 2 1200-1800
Best get your bank holiday trip to the DIY store over with in the morning, then, unless this is a dull match.

What’re the odds? Arsenal meet Chelsea for a quiet, cosy kickabout with several million people roaring them on. That’s all this will be.

To make sure this appeals to everyone, the teams are London ones but filled with players from around the world.

Here’s an idea of how important this is: it starts at 1500. So the build-up is twice the length of the game.

I even made football jokes. Now I’m wondering if someone else wrote all of these. It would explain some things.

58 Keys

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Just to say, it kills me beginning a blog title or actually any sentence with a number. It’s as knife-scraping as beginning one with a lowercase letter. Consequently, having written very many articles and news stories about the likes of the iPhone, I’m used to contorting headlines to fit in one word, any word, before the offending digit or lowercase. In this one situation, though, putting anything before “58 Keys” would change it.

“The 58 Keys” would make you think of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps, for instance. “The Mystery of the 58 Keys” is Agatha Christie if you’re normal, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators if you’re less so.

Mind you, just saying 58 Keys is at risk of putting you in mind of either Edgar Allen Poe or, in a slightly different chain of thought, Florida.

Somehow I think it’s fitting, however, that you are very unlikely to read that title and know what this is about yet it is impossible that you haven’t been affected by it. Now it sounds like a disease.

It’s just this. I offer that every artistic, sporting, engineering, scientific, medical, architectural, sculptural, scriptural, design or really any human endeavour, any human thought of the last thirty years has gone via a keyboard. That’s obviously true for writers but a sculptural artist, say, he or she may work with stone and chisels but at some point they email a gallery describing it.

Amateur photographers not intending to ever sell their work and, let’s go to an extreme here, too illiterate to write a caption, they still use a keyboard. Whether it’s holding down the Option key as they choose a function in Photoshop or it’s logging in to Flickr as CrazyNutBoy99, they use a keyboard.

We never think about this, most especially not if we’re touch typists, because we’re thinking about the work we do. The keyboard and our fingers on it are the bridge from our thoughts to the physical reality of what we’re creating. And I’m just fascinated by that. I’m fascinated by how pressing these keys means I get to talk to you. By how using exactly the same keys I will unthinkingly, unconsciously switch from writing words to issuing commands: I press Command-S to save my work do much that the S key is worn down.

If you’re reading this on a phone or a tablet then you’ve got an onscreen keyboard that pops up when you need it and hides away again when you don’t. If you’re on a laptop then these days the keys are probably what’s called a Chiclet style unless it’s a Butterfly mechanism or in Microsoft’s case a curious cloth-like one.

The type of key varies from silent and virtual to the mechanical Cherry keyboard that clacks away terribly satisfyingly to the ears of those of us trained on manual typewriters. The number of keys varies a lot too. It’s not that I usually go around counting them, honest, it’s more that for decades the standard layout for a computer keyboard has been what’s called the PC AT one with 102 keys. When you see the QWERTY layout with a numeric keypad to the right and arrow keys between the two, it’s probably 102 keys.

That is a standard, whether you’re using QWERTY or something like France’s AZERTY. That is also a standard whether you’re in the UK or the US, though for unfathomable historical reasons, our two nations have different keyboards. In the UK, the Return key is a tall one that takes up the space of two keys vertically. In America, it’s a wide one that takes up two key spaces horizontally. Nutters.

Even so, it’s the same number of keys and you have never looked at me so strangely before. Let me hurry to explain why I’ve called this 58 Keys and not 102.

It’s the Mac.

The original Apple Macintosh is the reason we have iPhones and iPads, it’s the reason we have Windows. And, yes, that original Mac had 58 keys on it.

There should’ve been 62. People at Apple fought over four more keys and they lost. Steve Jobs rejected four keys. He rejected the arrow keys. You can think that’s taking micro-management too far, but there was a reason.

He refused to allow the original Mac keyboard to have these arrow or cursor keys because if it had them, people would use them. Since it didn’t, there was no other way to move your cursor around the screen than to use the mouse. This was the first time any public computer had included a mouse and, as strange as it seems today, it was bloody hard to grasp what in the world this thing was for.

Taking away four keys meant you had to use the mouse and it’s part of why we did so it’s part of why we got to move away from those green or yellow phosphorus text displays into full-screen, full-colour, overlapping windows.

Even if you have never used a Mac, even if you’re a die-hard PC fan and even if you’ve only ever had your phone as a computer, the decision to give the Mac just 58 keys shaped everything we do today.

There’s no reason to say this to you now, no particular anniversary, no keyboard launch and definitely no way to explain why I currently have about nine keyboards in my house. But you will spend time at some keyboard today, whether that’s onscreen or physical, and you will every day. We could get really deep into how mechanical keys work, we could dive into how onscreen keyboards invisibly expand the letter you’re most likely to type next. But let’s just take a moment to notice how this small thing has world-changing impact.

Restored to life

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Confession: I backup everything I write, everything that lands on my Mac, everything. But I rarely go into the backups to restore anything. Until this week when my arm was twisted into powering up my last computer again and doing some work with it. I’m going to claim that it doesn’t matter what the work was but really, I just cannot remember – because of what I found instead.

Every five or six years I buy a new Mac and take a minute or two to bring over all my current documents. I also promise to sort out the pile of hard drives I have inside some of these Macs and outside all of them but I never do.

This week I did and it’s been like data archaeology. Let me just tell you this first: here on my old Mac Pro I found I’d got 44 feature films. They appear to have been ripped from my DVDs but I don’t remember doing that.

Then there are 279 whole episodes of TV series. Some DVD rips, some iTunes purchases, I don’t know.

And 15,768 radio or other audio tracks.

I do understand that one because I used to have my Mac Pro automatically switch itself on to record the Afternoon Drama on BBC Radio 4 every day so there’s a pile of those. It’s a pile with titles like ‘Afternoon Play -ep723.m4a’ and no other way to work out what each is but to listen.

Then, too, I’ve made a lot of radio on my Macs so there’s surely a thousand or more tracks to do with that.

One more thing. Somewhere in that Mac Pro’s folders there were also 3,336 scripts. A thousand or more movie scripts plus entire series of television ones. Oddly few radio, for some reason.

All of this is now on a drive connected to my iMac and Backblaze, my online backup service, is sweating as it uploads the lot to cloud storage to make sure it is never lost, that it is always available to me wherever I am.

And that would be where I’d stop. Look at this, I could say: I’ve found all this glorious material and that it will of course occupy me, enthral me, distract me.

Only, this digging into a massive personal archive turns out to be a delicate dig into the past. It’s delicate because at first you see a photograph and alongside it there’s the date. It’s a file on your Mac, there’s the name and there’s the the Date Modified. It’s putting a pin in a memory – but then opening that image, looking at that document, just glancing at it changes the Date Modified to today. It’s like grasping at something that crumbles in your hand.

Now, if you dig slightly to the left and down a bit there is way to show the Date Created. But I didn’t think of that until I’d go into paroxysms about the ephemeral nature of even digital memories.

And as I write this to you, I’m actually back by that old Mac Pro because I wanted to get that screen grab of its display looking whitewashed. (When did I take that whitewash photo? Apparently Sunday, 8 September 2013 at 11:12.)

But I’m looking for that date and the drives inside this Mac Pro began giving out a little scream.

They’re going to die. And I’ve already plugged in one ancient external drive that I pointlessly struggled to find the right cables for because it’s dead.

We use these machines to do our work and to do everything, but along the way we are inadvertently documenting our entire lives in sometimes minute-by-minute detail. It’s not always great detail. It’s sometimes scraping when you find an old email and the text comes along with a tsunami of upset.

It’s not great detail when you learn what open wounds you still have. But it is great detail, it is the greatest of all details, when you a To Do list from 2003 that has hopes for the future that you’ve since achieved.

I’m not saying you should dig through your old computer documents and I’m definitely not saying you should do it without a strong mug of tea beside you. But I am saying you should backup everything. I’ve said that for years and meant it in very practical terms but today I mean it in emotional ones too.