Hello, dear reader!
You join me in the less than comfortable position of writing to you, not from my customary seat on the couch, but from the confines of my wheelchair.
The reason for this? I hear you ask.
Well, it’s a matter of timing and of technology. A matter of disaster and finance. A matter, in fact, of one very not well laptop.
I say not well, but obviously the thing is working well enough for me to jot down these few lines of half thought out prose (go on, admit it, that’s a half more than you suspected). No, the problem isn’t in its processing power, it’s memory or any of its programmes, apps, or packages,
It’s in the fact the screen which seems to have exploded.
Fair & Square
I don’t mean literally. There was no bang, big or otherwise; no shards of, well, whatever it is they make laptop screens out of flying through the air. There wasn’t even a puff or two of smoke to mark the demise of the display. Instead, all that happened was me opening the thing up on Saturday morning to find a grid of fine lines and wide boxes of colour, almost like a Piet Mondrian painting copied by an old and eccentric dot matrix printer with only half its ink cartridges filled.
You see, the only way to operate the laptop is to hook it up to the telly by way of a HDMI cable. This works surprisingly well, although as I indicated in my opening remark, the length of said cable means leaving the comfort of the couch and parking my wheelchair a tad too close to the wall mounted telly. A position my mum would probably tell me will end up giving me square eyes.
But I forbear, and with that forbearance, everything is good (well, tolerable). Right up until Tina wants to watch something on the box.
We only have the one T.V., you see. It’s fine in the normal course of events. There is much we can watch together, such as Bake Off, American Horror Story, anything Marvel, and, lately random episodes of Doctor Who (Tina being a recent convert who still doesn’t like 12 for some reason).
There are times, however, where our tastes diverge. I’m partial, every now and then, to watching people on Youtube watching things I’ve already watched. I like football, murder mysteries, films with bendy plots, the odd bit of political commentary, and things going boom. Tina prefers brass band music, Australians marrying complete strangers, romantic comedies (a contradiction in terms on two counts), and documentaries about people with 22 kids. These are decidedly unmixy things.
And that would be where the laptop comes in. It allows us both to seal ourselves off in our own little worlds—Together, but apart, as we pursue our own interests. It’s fair to say the last week has been a test for us both.
There is a solution, as I’m sure you’ve worked out. We can always get the laptop fixed, or replaced. A solution that is as elegant and simple as it is potentially expensive, especially considering the time of year. However, faced with the choice of my brain slowly dribbling out of my ears after another 45 minutes of contrived ‘drama’ that certainly hasn’t been engineered to chase ratings, I think it’s fast becoming a very necessary expense.
And on that divisive note, I shall wish you all, my dear readers, a wonderful Xmas and the happiest of New Years. There's no blog next week, as both Tina and I will be busy being festive, so we’ll see you all in 2024!
Until next year…
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Hey, there! If you enjoyed reading any of the above, why not take a look at some of my published work? Below you’ll find links to a number of short stories I’m lucky enough to have included in anthologies. I’d love to know what you think
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