Over the last few days, my computer has been acting weird. It was OK until Mr Grumpy suggested I run a program that gets rid of all your temporary files and releases more space on your hard drive. What he didn't tell me before I clicked start was to un-tick certain boxes. The result was that all my passwords were wiped out, so I had to try and remember what the Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Hotmail, eBay, Babble (and more) passwords were, and of course they all different.
My Windows 8 (should be called Windows Hate) tiles vanished and so did all my icons and I got a blank brown screen. Panic!!! With much grumping, he managed a semi-fix but it's still not quite the same as it was before I meddled. I've never had an easy relationship with technology and swear most colourfully at all my devices. I even managed to do something to my Kindle through pressing the wrong button when I was sleepy.
I think I'll go back to real books. The worst that can happen is that you fall asleep with a book on the bed and it falls off in the night with a crash and wakes you up with a horrible start, making you think there must be someone in the room, either corporeal or ghostly.
Then there's the autumnal weather; a return of grey, damp days, of the last of the flowers, of the trees de-leafing, which always makes me think of that wonderful, lump-in-the-throat poem, Spring and Fall: to a young child, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which conveys the same core message as all those syllable-dragging volumes of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, encapsulated in just fifteen lines. If only Proust could have been equally brief.
I've just taken a half dose of Night Nurse. If I took a whole one, I'd sleep till lunchtime. Hang on a minute... what a blissful idea!
