Rage against the machine. Or a new computer brings me fury and joy.

The computer stutters and quivers and goes strange colours (sometimes it is like a fog has descended.) A vast amount of the time it will not do anything. Every time I scan it, it finds thousands more errors. This morning, it ate half a chapter of book.

I think, plaintively: but I never, ever open those emails asking me if I would like a more erect erection. (I think the people who send these are a little muddled.)

Just at the moment of terror and despair, the door goes and Stanley the Dog barks his head off and I find a kind gentleman with a box. ‘Oh Stanley,’ I cry, gazing at the gentleman with pitiful delight. ‘Don’t bark. It’s the lovely man from John Lewis.’

(I needed some linen and a nice shampoo and various other things at the same time, so I got it all from John Lewis, which is never knowingly undersold, and delivers in about half an hour flat and does not discriminate against me because I live north of Watford.)

The man from John Lewis looked slightly surprised, but took it in his stride. Stanley gave up barking and went to inspect his van.

‘He thinks you’ve got Bonios,’ I say, conversationally. I am giddy with relief and so quite chatty.

‘Fish and chips,’ says the gentleman, not seeming to mind.

‘Oh careful,’ I say. ‘He’ll have that. He’s a lurcher.’

We part in mutual fondness. Or it may be that the happy look in his eye is simply because he is managing to escape before I start telling him about Red the Mare and how the great filly Treve danced all over her opponents at Longchamp yesterday, quckening miraculously off a slow pace and shooting courageously through gaps that were not there. I swear at one point she just shouldered her way past two other horses as if to say: out of the way ladies, girl’s coming through.

And so, the day is saved. I am passionately glad that I shall not lose everything. But the day is also lost, in the temporal sense, because of the endless, grinding, convoluted, sadistic process of setting up a new machine.

What about the old ladies? I find myself thinking. I’m not a techie, but I’m under fifty and reasonably well-educated. I got email half way through my twenties, although at the time I only knew one other person who had it, and we used to send merry exchanges across the Atlantic Ocean, in a slightly self-conscious early adopter kind of way. I admit I did have to type both my first books on a typewriter. But still. I am of the technology age. Yet it took six hours. SIX. What about those people who grew up with pens and paper and dial telephones? My mother actually spent her childhood driving around in a pony and trap because it was the war and there was no petrol. How would that generation manage?

It is the most lovely, sleek, beautiful machine. It is all shiny and fast and new. But it has Windows 8 on it. Windows 8 looks frantically sexy and is the work of Satan. Well, they always say the devil will have the best lines. It’s all touch-screen and trying to be Apple, and I don’t really like Apple. (That is a very subjective judgement. I realise it is brilliant. I just like typing and clicking.) It is filled with meretricious buttons which it calls Apps, in a dad-dancing kind of way, trying to get down with the kids.

What about the old gentlemen? I think. Do the silver surfers count for nothing? How shall they work all this out?

It has lots of commercial things stitched into it. I don’t want shopping applications and the ghastly Norton and an Ebay button and various things which insist I must scan my registry this very minute. I like choosing my own. Free market, I snort, the old lefty in me suddenly singing the Internationale. Not very free, if you ask me. I feel as if I am being press-ganged.

So I bash my way through my first world problems and think how absurd all this new technology is, and feel glad that I may get a lovely new machine but also furious that I have to, since obsolescence seems to be built in.

I’d like one good item onto which I could put all the nice software which I have chosen and which contains all my writing and all my photographs of Red the Mare and Stanley the Dog and all the old tunes I adore and for it to last for ten years. But that, apparently, would not please the grasping cabal of computer people, who clearly don’t give a bugger about landfill and just want me to have to replace the poor tottering creatures every two years. It has happened with every machine I’ve ever owned, no matter how much anti-virus I put in, or firewalls I erect. They just start to die. (Except, I do admit, there was one which I slaughtered myself, with Diet Coke.)

Still, I must count my blessings. The thing is very pretty and it works. I may write my book and do my work. I just need a little strong liquor for the regulation new computer rage.

 

No time for pictures. It’s after the Archers, even. I don’t know what I’m doing really, sitting here writing a blog at this time of night. But I do know that these three don’t give a bugger about technology, and I find that rather soothing:

In which everything almost CRASHES. And, of course, Red the Mare saves the day.

The day, which started off on a blast with good HorseBack work and 1378 words of book, went into a spiral at about 3.30pm as my computer began to exhibit signs of catastrophic failure.

You all know this. You have all had the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH. I jabbed pointlessly with my finger, booted and rebooted, prayed to the non-existent technology gods, grew tearful, shouted at myself for being such an idiot for not heeding the warning signs earlier, and reflected bitterly on my absolute dependence on this machine. All my work is in here; all my pictures, music, communications. I have, for once in my life, backed up the most important files, but even then, if the thing were to go phut, which it was threatening to do, I am left with nothing but a useless black box and I live forty miles from the nearest computer shop, and that is the eighth circle of hell that is PC World. I would almost rather pull out my own fingernails than go there.

As I was wrestling and swearing and weeping and praying, I thought I might ask the Horse Talker to do evening stables tonight. I would have to stay shackled to my desk and curse the ghastliness of the modern electronic world. Then I thought: bugger it. I managed to shut down the computer. I’ll just give it a little rest, I thought, and go and put on Red’s raincoat, since it had started pelting with rather cold rain. She is a thin-skinned thoroughbred. Unlike native breeds, she needs a little protection.

When I got to the field, she was sheltering under her favourite tree, with her small herd gathered safely around her. The moment she saw me at the top gate, she led them all the way up, in Indian file. I dashed in, tense and furious still from the computer frenzy, flapping the rugs about in a most unhorsewoman-like manner.

My darling old duchess stopped stock still and looked at me seriously as if to say: yes, I suspect it is the moment for the lightweight waterproof. She ducked her head and stood like a statue as I fumbled about with the straps. She sighed a little half-suppressed sigh, as if not wanting to be rude. (We do, after all, put a high premium on manners in this field.)

Autumn the Filly then did the same. My angst fled. I was so overcome with the goodness and sweetness of these two clever equines, who presented themselves politely in the middle of a violent rainstorm, with no need for a halter or a rope, and did not appear to mind how cack-handed I was as I fiddled about in a way calculated to irritate a sensitive flight animal. Myfanwy the Pony, being a hardy mountain breed, does not need rugging, and merely stood to one side, watching the proceedings with a sage eye.

Red blew down her nose and rested her head against me and I stroked her sweet spot and chatted to her for a bit and felt my knotted shoulders come down. Every damn time, she gives me the gift of peace. Then she whickered gently to remind me that it was time for her tea.

When I got back, restored, I turned the shaky contraption back on. There was no BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH, but it was all glitchy and scratchy and mostly unresponsive. Finally, I got some kind of scan to work. It turned out that I had 7099 catastrophic errors. My poor old computer, I thought; all that time I was berating it and cussing it and jabbing it, it was doing its best. I had let it get clogged with junk and nonsense and fragments.

The good old cleaner chugged away, and suddenly, miraculously, it was working again. So I write this with grateful fingers and think that never again shall I let the poor machine get in such a mess. And I reflect, as always, how miraculous it is that even in the midst of a crashing tech fail, that great red mare can still calm my troubled mind.

Almost time for The Archer now, so just two quick pictures, of the little Zen mistresses who hold my sanity in their dear hooves:

(Don’t you love that little Myfanwy face in the background? Whilst the big girls come to the gate at feeding time, she stays staunchly under her favoured tree, until the bowls come out and it is time to line up at the fence. Makes me laugh, every morning, and every evening.)

The day is saved

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The Apple outbreak amongst the readers made me laugh a lot. I had no idea that there was so much Mr Jobs love in these halls. And I’m afraid, at this stage, it prompts me to a most shameful admission. It is: I do not like the Apple Mac.

There, I’ve said it. There is the streaming relief of confession.

Not liking Apple is something one keeps very, very quiet about. Not just because the Apple devotees are so passionate, but also because not liking Apple marks you as an unimaginative plodder, a bourgeois moored in moribund tradition, a suit, a grouch and a staid. The groovy, creative people are Apple people; the PC people are just drones.

I don’t like Apple for some really odd reasons, too. I should stress here that I am not saying Apple is no good; it’s just not for me. My reasons are tiny, personal, and faintly pedantic.

The number one dealbreaker is that I do not like the operating font. I said this to someone once, and it was as if I were speaking Urdu. Alarmed incomprehension spread over their face; I had to make a joke and change the subject. I have not mentioned it again, until this morning, when I made the crazed admission to the World Traveller. She has seen me straight and seen me curly, and takes my idiosyncrasies in her elegant stride. Amazingly, she immediately understood. Oh, oh, I thought, perhaps I am not such a freak.

I would imagine that some people do not notice, or care about, fonts. I really, really do. I cannot write a document in anything but Georgia, or Times New Roman or Cambria. I have had computers which default to dull Courier or bland Ariel and it makes me nuts in the head. I don’t know what the Apple font is called, but I cannot be doing with it. It looks like the print equivalent of baby food; there is something unformed and juvenile about it.

The other thing, which is so stupidly small that I can hardly bear to tell you, is that Apple computers do not click. I imagine many people love this. There is just a smooth patch where you may tap your finger to indicate command. I like a proper button with a satisfying click to it, so I know I am doing something. I also like the right click function, where a full menu comes up, offering me lists of choice.

I suppose it’s a bit like a car. I’ve driven a stick shift all my life. I can see why people love automatics; I can see their merits; but I want proper gears, for roaring round corners and tackling hills. When I drive my stepfather’s automatic, I keep putting my hand out to change gear and stamping my left foot into vacancy where the clutch should be, the muscle memory is so strong. My muscle memory is not geared to Apple, for all its virtues.

Finally, people love their Macs because of all the wonderful creative things they can do. The Younger Niece is always making wonderful videos on hers. The Man in the Hat practically writes symphonies on his. But even though I am supposedly ‘a creative’, all I really use my computer for is tap tap tapping at the keys. I need to look things up on the internet, store photographs for the blog, write books, listen to music, and read a paper, and that’s pretty much it. My creation lies all in the mind, where I try to think of interesting ideas and ponder the human condition and dream up sentences that swing. The computer I need for that is a very basic tool indeed.

All of which is a very long way of saying, I got a lovely new Hewlett Packard. It was a piece of glorious serendipity. I’d looked all over the internet and decided a nice g6 would do me perfectly. (I’m never going back to Dell again.) I could not face going into the city, and an online order would take two days. Next day delivery, I discover, means: if you live south of Edinburgh. On a chance, I decided to see if the Tesco up the road might have something; they very occasionally stock the odd computer. There are no electronic shops in our local town, but the little supermarket there, built rather charmingly in the style of a Swedish holiday cabin, does a few televisions and a very occasional laptop.

Nothing there when I arrived, just rows of pointless flat screen televisions. I supposed it was too much to hope for. A smiling young fellow approached, seeing my bewildered face.

‘I don’t suppose,’ I said, diffidently, ‘you have any computers? I seem to remember you sometimes did in the past.’

He regarded the empty shelves without optimism, but he was a helpful man, and he said he would look in the back. I had very little hope.

Presently, he came back bearing a box. ‘This is the only one we have,’ he said. I peered at the uninformative cardboard. On the side, in very, very small print it said: Hewlett Packard Pavilion G6.

‘I can’t believe it,’ I said, in rising excitement. ‘That’s the exact one I wanted. It’s a sign.’

He smiled, a little baffled.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You have saved me the long trek to Aberdeen, I can’t thank you enough. There are not enough words to express how happy you have made me. I need new words for happy.’

He looked faintly startled, but then he seemed to realise that he had really added something to the sum total of human happiness that day, and the thought appeared to please him.

‘You are very, very kind indeed,’ I said.

It was a shade under three hundred pounds. On the internet, these machines are over five hundred. I don’t know how my tiny Tesco up the road does it; sometimes I have dark suspicions that they get them off the back of a lorry. Still, I am not looking a gift horse in the mouth, and this is a very shiny, prancy show pony of a gift.

As I went to the car, I suddenly realised that, in my exuberance, I had not even checked the specs. Oh well, I thought, as long as it has 320GB of memory, that will do. I peered at the tiny print. SIX HUNDRED AND FORTY. I laughed out loud, frightening a shopper who was getting out of a car nearby. To get an Apple with that much juice I would have had to shell out over two and half grand. Even if Frankel wins every single one of his races this season, I can’t pay for that with my William Hill account.

There was one final glitch, too dull to go into, but it involved a call to the Hewlett Packard help centre. There, I found the other kindest man in Britain, a man called David from Newcastle. Usually, when I ask about a problem, I am braced for refusal. ‘Oh,’ he said, a smile in his voice, when I explained my glitch, ‘that’s really, really...’

Oh no, I thought, he’s going to say impossible, disastrous, beyond the wit of man.

‘Easy,’ he said.

‘I don’t believe it,’ I shouted. ‘You have made my day.’

I showered him with thanks and compliments, and we parted on terms of high amity. If Hewlett Packard has more operatives like David from Newcastle, they can have my business for ever. Until the next black screen of death, I suppose.

I am typing this now on my lovely new machine. I may again work and blog and look up obscure things on the Google. The keyboard is delightfully springy, and my fingers appreciate it keenly. It also has a robust delete button, unlike my last one, which was on a hair trigger and drove me mad. I resolve to install the strongest anti-virus known to woman and never to pour water all over the keyboard, which was how I killed the computer before last. And, I am certainly taking the Dear Readers’ advice to take the poor old machine to some young computer whizz and see if the photographs may be retrieved from the black screen of death.

But all two hundred and sixty something of my word files are safe, and that is all I care about now.

 

As I was sorting everything out and downloading all the programmes I like, I came upon some photographs of the garden from this time last year:

And there was the dear old Duchess, looking grander and more beautiful than any dog has a right to. Goodness, I do miss her still:

And from the garden today:

Red, from a couple of days ago:

She was especially lovely today, when I went up for her lessons. I am teaching her quite a lot of new things, and she is a very quick and docile study. She also is much happier after her training than before it. I think that it reassures her. Even by very gently getting her to do quite small things, I establish myself as the lead horse and that makes her feel safe. Being the lead mare is a rotten job, and quite tiring if you are an actual horse; it’s lovely for them if someone else takes up the gauntlet. So she ducks her head and blows gently through her nostrils and blinks in dozy joy as I scratch her sweet spots, knowing that I have her back.

Pigeon putting on her questing face:

Look at those eyes, filled with sky.

Hill, in the spring rain:

Rage against the machine

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

My computer starts braying at me, like a maddened donkey. Then everything flashes. Then everything freezes. If I were not such an anti-cliché vamp, I should say my blood ran cold. (Actually, one does feel a sort of physical chilling effect in moments of panic; and anyway, there are clichés and clichés.)

A furious sign appears. Disc full alert, it says, or something equally terrifying. Apparently, I have only 113mb of space left. For those who do not speak computer, i.e. My Mother, this is absolutely nothing. If my computer were an acre, I would have one square foot of room left in which to move.

I do not understand. There are many things about machines I do not understand. Specifically, I did a big clear-out only last week. I was so proud of myself. I threw out a whole forty gigs of junk. Suddenly, my poor old contraption had a bit of room to breathe. In under eight days, all that had been mysteriously filled up.

The thing has gone rogue, I think. I have downloaded nothing in that time. I have taken a few pictures, that is all. Slightly shaky, I go to the pictures file, to have a rummage. It turns out that I have 7,345 photographs. How does that even happen?

Even more alarming, they appear to exist in three locations, which means in effect I have over 22,000 pictures files. There are things I knew I deleted, but the computer has said no, and squirreled them away in secret cellars and dungeons, scattered about my hard disc. I find endless duplicates. Each one has to be individually removed, with an infuriating ARE YOU SURE notice after each. Yes, yes, bugger off, of course I am sure. I start to grow crazed with the machine. Is it questioning whether I know my own mind?

I waste at least two hours of valuable work time doing what is euphemistically called ‘housekeeping’. None of it makes any sense. There are files where there should not be files. At one moment, there is no disc space left at all; after a reboot, there are, bizarrely, sixty gigs, which is much, much more than the amount of nonsense I have just deleted. I think: are there gremlins in the thing, secretly reproducing in the night? Have I lost control of my own implement? This is supposed to be my slave, not my mistress.

Eventually, things rock back to some kind of normality. Disaster seems to be averted, although I have deep technological questions to which I can find no answers. (Why are there suddenly 179 photographs in a Temp file, which was not there five minutes ago?) I wish, mournfully, that The Man in the Hat were here, because this is ABC to him. For me, it is like trying to have a conversation about sovereign debt in Italian, when all I can actually say in Italian is please and thank you and goodness the Campo de Fiori is beautiful.

It makes me think about impotence. I’ve been having sudden moments of cresting fury, small random rages, in the last few days. I am not good with anger. I do not know where to put it. (I asked The Brother this, yesterday. Take it outside and shout it into the wind, was his advice.) My crossness is a delayed reaction to one specific thing, in which a person has done me egregious wrong, and there is little chance for redress. It is one of those things where you have to let it go, and you persuade yourself you have let it go, because otherwise it will eat you up from the inside, and then you find yourself yelling at an inanimate object. At which point, it becomes clear that the letting go is not working so very well.

I realised that this specific rage, about this one event (too dull to tell you all about), had been steadily leaking out into unrelated areas of life. It could be big things: my bloody father bloody dying. It could be tiny things: the fact that I can never find my mobile telephone, and, if I do find it, it turns out I have always forgotten to charge it.

I can get violently cross about intractable political matters, and pointless tribalisms, and the stupid bankers with their stupid salaries. Mr Hester, I think, enraged, suddenly taking it very personally: do you really need your £35 million in three years? Thirty-five million quid. That is how much we, the taxpayers, have paid the fellow in order to sack people and watch the share price of RBS go down, down, down.

Then, back to the very small again, and I find myself hideously affronted that a complete stranger will ring me up, in the evening, and ask if I want some double glazing. How dare you encroach on my privacy, I think, in stupid rage.

The computer crossness runs over all this like a palimpsest. It’s a combination of not quite knowing what I am doing, the machine refusing to do what I am certain I have told it to do, and the denial of agency. I damn well pressed that button; I got rid of that file; I made space. And now there the bloody thing still is, in some inexplicable other location, as if the computer is defying me, and spends its free time hiding stuff from me, for a joke. I think the fatal thing about machines is they make us dependent on them, so that when they suddenly do not work we know not what to do. It's like when there is a power cut, and I realise I can do nothing, not boil an egg, have a cup of coffee, keep warm, turn on a light.

There is a sense of wider grumpiness, in the population at large. The Grumpy Old Men and Grumpy Old Women have their very own television franchise, where they get to grumble about everything from school to Christmas. It takes hardly anything to send the Twitterati into incandescence. Columnists traffic in rage, against any perceived slight, politically correct idiocy, ministerial initiative.

I wonder if the computer feeling is not a tiny, telling exemplar of a broader malaise. There are many areas of life which seem beyond our human control: the climate, racing technology, the tectonic plates of geo-politics, the secretive workings of the masters of the universe (very few mistresses, even now) as they rig the financial world for their own enrichment, intractable political problems, the mysterious bureaucracies of Brussels.

Only this morning, people were shouting about the NHS. No one can agree. The government bill is brilliant, and the only thing to save the health service; the government bill is disastrous, and the NHS shall die. Doctors want it, doctors don’t want it; the nurses are furious; the commentators are split. The citizen can only sit back and watch, and hope that someone, somewhere, knows what they are doing. The future of the dear old NHS, the thing of which we are so proud, despite the national sport of grumbling about it, hangs in a balance about which I can do nothing.

All of which is rather a long way of saying that perhaps it is not surprising that sometimes I get cross. I wonder if I am living in world rigged for crossness. I am inclined to think of anger as something bad, something which must be fixed. Perhaps it’s just a perfectly reasonable response to an unreasonable world.

I am not certain. It’s a fledgling theory and I am still working on it.

The main thing is the computer and I are friends again. I bless it each day; its miraculous chips and wiring and widgets allow me to do my work and read the internet and go on Twitter for fun. It is a thing I do not take for granted. I do not enjoy staring at the flashing screen bellowing What the fuck??? (You know when I start using three question marks things are very dire.) Let us hope the whirling disc gremlins do not come again in the night, and all shall stay calm, and I can think serene thoughts and make green soup and breathe.

Pictures are not quite of the day. As I went through the ancient, clogged photograph files, ruthlessly pruning and chucking, I found there were some old ones I could not quite throw out. (The excess if not just due to computer malfunction and defiance, but also because I find it almost impossible to delete anything of The Pigeon, even if it is slightly out of focus.) Here are a few darlings from the last six months that I could not quite kill. I am afraid they are rather dog-heavy, surprise surprise. Although there is also a pig, a robin, a Younger Niece, and some random grass:

And here is a quick snapshot of what today looked like. Afternoon light:

FIRST SNOWDROPS:

Yearny face:

Hill: