Bad lucks

 

It has, I fear, been a bad week. It started on Sunday night when I was away and having trouble getting the BBC on my laptop. In the hope of getting a better connection, I switched off and switched on again. Well I tried to switch on, because what came up on the screen was not the friendly apple, but a far from friendly question mark. Absolutely no way of getting in to my documents.

This was a nasty moment. I am not wholly efficient about backing up and though I knew I had most of the book in several places, I wasn't completely certain that I had backed up the Further Reading I was just finishing. It wasn't until about 2.30 in the morning that I could make certain via my iphone that it really was on Dropbox (I'd forgotten my Dropbox password). 

There was still quite a lot, however, that would have been very inconvenient to lose and that I knew full well was not copied anywhere. So as soon as I got back to Cambridge I dashed round to our excellent Faculty Computer Officer to throw the laptop on his mercy. I have to say it did not look hopeful to start with, but 4 hours later, the hard disk had been taken out of my machine and copied onto another one. And I had been packed off with a loaned laptop attached to said disk, with nothing lost.

And the moral is . . .?? How often do I say that to my students... 'you mean you didn't have it backed up?'

It wasn't the end of my troubles, though.

On Wednesday I was taking all proofs -- a very large bundle -- to my publishers, and had the loaned laptop with me (now fully kitted out with my documents) in order to be able to check things against my original versions. So I was pretty loaded. About three minutes after I had got off the train at Kings Cross I realised that I didn't have the laptop with me. Apart from everything else, imagine going to tell the computer officer that I had left the machine he had kindly leant me on the train (isn't that what only civil servants in the MOD do?). So I ran back to the train, picking up a very kind man from the station staff on the way, and we just managed to get on and rescue the poor object about 30 seconds before the train was chuffing back to Cambridge.

And then things got worse. I had had a bit of a dicky knee while I had been away, but it had recovered with some low level tlc (hence I could run to rescue the laptop!). This morning I was leaving the house, walking up the garden steps on the way to London again when I wrenched it...in a rather painful way, as I later realised (not soon enough to realise that biking to the station wasn't really a good idea).

As the day has gone by, I have got slower and it has got more uncomfortable, at least when I put any weight on it. (For those of you who know Cambridge station, you'll understand why I wanted to weep when I realised on my return that we were getting into platform 8.)

So I'm writing this in bed, having done the ice pack treatment, and got the poor limb elevated on the pillows. And I'm wondering rather gloomily if this is what old age WILL be like, or if -- more realistically -- what it IS like.