Hard drive

I've got one. A shiny little metal thing, to hold my zillions of photographs. I realised that since digital cameras became the norm, a computer was a far less safe means of storing wonky pictures of my beloved team, my friends and family (all of whom invariably complain that they look fat/ugly/half-witted/demented), my chaotic but evolving home, my life, really, captured in blurry, badly-composed pictures, than the old method, i.e. the old shoe boxes that litter the house. Shoe boxes don't suffer fatal crashes to the same degree that PCs can, but I haven't had a hard copy of a photograph for years. The thought of losing all those pictures recording the past 5 years was too awful to contemplate, for all that the record is largely banal or trivial - food, baking, cats, dog, gardening, weather, snails, workmen, close-ups of cute tabby kitten whiskers. A rich treasure trove of aide-memoires for when my memory gets even worse ("No, mum, Patrick wasn't your boyfriend, he was your tabby cat - look, I'll show you his picture!")...

So I have stayed in for most of the day awaiting delivery of this new object of desire, feeling virtuous that this was all I had ordered, and not the gleaming white Mac that I really covet (a want, not a need; I could easily convince myself that an external hard drive is both a want and a need). It came, I plugged it in, and nothing happened. After a bit of sitting in front of the screen, mouth slightly open, eyes a little glazed, I realised that nothing was going to happen, no wizard-led installation process - it was already there, waiting to be used. How easy was that!

So I set to in a determined and organised manner, and now, as if by magic, half my photos are sitting safely inside this neat little box - although I stopped before RSI set in, and went off in search of dinner - and the rest will be moved tomorrow. Strangely, I find that I have no feelings of protectiveness towards any of my documents; only those amateurish pictures matter.

You can always find and copy another special recipe, or write another reference or letter of complaint, but you can never recapture the moment when those tabby kitten whiskers were at their cutest.