Fidelma Cook

IT sits in its original box in front of me on the table taunting me with its unreachable treasures. Treasures is not too strong a word to me, for the names, the numbers, the shortcuts and passwords to my daily needs. I don’t want to even think of the lost photographs of the past two years.

It is my life, my memories in that white box with the Apple logo and, as of writing, no way to retrieve them. My MacBook Air is no more and the fault lies solely with me.

Whether it’s the medication or the disease, I have a habit of suddenly falling asleep, totally out of the blue over book or computer. There is no warning. I just go out.

Unfortunately this time I went out holding the remains of a small glass of red wine.

Instantly awake, I quickly wiped the spatters on the keyboard but somehow missed the tiny amount that had seeped under the machine.

All continued working but the battery started to drain. And when gone it wouldn’t work from the mains either.

I shook it, I begged it and I finally cursed it but nothing, nothing. Even my overworked guardian angel was no help this time.

I felt as drained as the battery – there was a huge emptiness within me – a missing; a crater of ignorance; a loss of knowledge which increases anyway with my treatments. This was followed by utter panic.

How have we come to rely so much on these machines and lost our ability to retain whole screeds of numbers?

At least I had my old Mac with all its faults and could write the column. But Pierce had secreted it away with other valuables and gave me two places to look, both upstairs in the study.

Miriam went to search, then Pierrot…nothing. Miriam is not of this century, as my cocked up household machines can testify, plus she refuses to wear her glasses.

Pierrot is similar unless it can kill a boar.

The following day Alistair came to search. He found it in five minutes – where Pierce said it was.

I can’t deal with these situations any more in my permanent state of irritability, exhaustion and lethargy, where even a Zimmer crawl needs a morphine tab to straighten the back.

But somehow in French then English I had almost managed to arrange for the silent Mac to be picked up and taken for repair in Toulouse.

And that was when it all went wrong.

My machine would be returned fixed but wiped clean of all data – the Apple man told me that’s what they did now before looking for the problem.

“But it’s obviously the battery or a short circuit, not the hard drive,” I told him. That’s what they did – wipe before repair, he said cheerfully.

And no, of course I’ve no back-up of any kind.

And never mind the tutting and head-shaking. I kept meaning to but my road to hell has always been paved with many, many such good intentions.

So now it sits in its box and I keep hoping for divine intervention in that I’ll try plugging it in in a few days’ time and – lo and behold! – it will restart. The gross unfairness of it all, of course, is the number of times I’ve weaved over my Mac, full glass of wine slopping in hand, and not spilled a drop. Not a bloody drop.

Now, with the meagre dregs of one of my two tiny glasses a day, I destroy everything.

So I’m trying to recreate what I had but of course I can’t remember most of what I had and there’s little point torturing myself searching for words.

I think I’ve said (I can’t remember) that the brain radiation definitely has affected my memory, particularly my French.

So I sit searching for things I don’t remember and, if I do, try to remember them in French….which I don’t remember.

However, I’m lucky I have this old Mac at least and can see the newspapers and watch the news, and write the col.

At the moment I am not prepared to allow Apple to wipe me out – there must be another way.

It’s actually quite scary to be in thrall to such ultimately fragile machines.

I remember with affection my Olivetti portable typewriter, my bulging contacts book, my fine lined notebooks and the black ink only of my pens.

My mind was definitely sharper then, without the easy shortcuts of search engines and spell checks, cut-and-paste and word counts.

I liked my desks brimming over with papers, pens, ripped out newspapers, envelopes of library cuttings, overflowing ashtrays.

At least if you threw wine over them they had a fair chance of drying out, not exploding.