Technical traumas

What a day I had of it yesterday.  I came down in the morning, turned on the Mac on which I do my Plank writing – and nothing.  Well, not nothing, but some peculiar logo that meant – I discovered from frantic searches on my phone – that the Mac could not locate its start-up files.  Madness: they were presumably where they had been every day of the silly machine’s life.  But after four hours of trying every start-up-inducing trick that the Mac forums and sites had to offer, I had to concede defeat: the Mac is, for now at least, as dead as a dead dodo.

Thankfully I also have my work laptop with me, which has the same writing software installed on it (thank heavens for whatever prompted me to download that a couple of years ago) and my husband was able to email me the backup files that I put onto a USB stick before I left home.  I’ve lost two days’ work but everyone assures me that someone clever in an Apple shop will be able to recover them for me.  It’s a hassle, as now I will have two versions of “Plank 4” – the one I did on the Mac and the one I am now doing on the laptop – but it will simply be a case of comparing the two versions and concentrating really hard as I merge them by hand.  It could have been worse.

So – long story short – having got up at 0600 in order to have a really long writing day, I managed fewer than 1,600 words, and developed about that many grey hairs with all the technical worries.  On the plus side, as I downloaded like a demon in the wifi zone up at the village, I got chatting to an Englishman and he bought “Fatal Forgery” from Amazon right there in front of me.