I am still without a functioning computer.
Despite a great deal of puzzled squinting at it, despite having entered my password and my six digit access code and my email address and my Apple ID and my iCloud password and my mother’s maiden name and the name of my first pet and the first school that I went to and my password again, I am still not yet back in the cyber-age.
It keeps showing me a half-eaten apple in the middle of the screen with a slowly lengthening line underneath, and a little caption that says: Updating files. This will take approximately 32 minutes.
It is all very complicated.
It is made difficult partly because I am stupid, but also because I want it to upgrade to a differently romantic and exotic sounding operating system. There are several, depending how archaic your computer is. They are called things like Lion and Snow Leopard and Mojave.
This is to make you think of sultry days and wilderness and freedom when you are sitting in front of your computer, instead of about changing your gas supplier.
I would like to upgrade my currently inefficient operating system, and am working my way up through the newer and more magical alternatives. I have got to something called Sierra, which I have got to have installed before I can ask Apple for permission to move up to the next one, which is called High Sierra.
I do not have the first, remotest hint of a clue what the difference is, or even, if I am honest, what an operating system is for at all. None of them seem to be offering to switch the lights on and off or order me a pizza. All of them have beautiful pictures of craggy mountain ranges and a reluctance to have anything to do with emails.
Whilst I have been waiting for the files to update and the apple to go mouldy I have been engaged in a series of other domestic activities, mostly in connection to feeding everybody. I have cooked sausages and rice and chicken and two sorts of squishy swiss-roll bread, and this afternoon I took the children to visit the optician.
I had to remember to do this all by myself, because of my computer not being sufficiently modern yet, but I managed all right, because of still having prehistoric management skills and an alarm clock.
Actually I took Lucy, because Oliver was at work barbering.
I don’t really need to take Lucy any more, because she is eighteen, and a fully-licensed grown up, but until her grown-upness stretches to paying-for-thingsness then my presence is handy.
Oliver turned up after a while, because the barber’s shop is opposite the optician, and sank down into the chair with the relief of one who has just completed a hard day at work.
He needs glasses.
I knew that from the first moment, when the optician told him to read the second line on the screen, and he looked a bit anxious and said: ‘er…’
He doesn’t just need glasses. The optician, who is youthful and enthusiastic and smiled a lot at Lucy, suggested that what he really needs is contact lenses.
Not any old ordinary contact lenses. These are special contact lenses that you wear at night and they squash your eye back into the right shape. You take them out in the morning, and your sight is back to normal. During the day your eye slowly sinks back into its undesirable short-sighted shape, and at bedtime you put the lenses back in.
Apparently they stop your eyes from getting any worse as well, and if you wear them for long enough your eye might in the end go back to being the right shape for always and always. Nobody knows if this happens yet, because they have not been invented for long enough.
I thought that they sounded absolutely revolting, but Oliver was quite keen.
The optician mentioned some numbers, the sort that come with pound signs in front of them, and I felt our lovely financial solvency beginning to slip away from me, like trying to hold jelly with chopsticks.
I have bargained with the optician that we will give them a go at Easter, by which time I might have managed to save up a bit.
I will be sorry to be overdrawn again. I have enjoyed solvency more than I can tell you.
Ah well. Happy New Year.
