The end has still not come, but the beginning is already here. This is the complicated state of affairs on my desk at the moment. If you take a look at the desk under the window you will see a fine display of silver and black set against a faux ash desk. It is such a fine display that you would almost call in a vista, which would be quite appropriate. This is the new computer with its "Big Boy" 22 inch widescreen and its Microsoft Vista operating system. So far I have managed to transfer all my music and half my photographs : but have hit a stone wall in relation to internet access. No great surprise, I expected problems with internet access, people predicted problems and I have problems. This means that a second desk - dirty old softwood with chipped metal highlights - holds my old computer, still hobbling away, still connected to the internet. I need to phone my internet service provider and get some new disks and cables, but something is holding me back.
It is the "new beginnings" paradox (the desire for a perfect new beginning which sweeps away all the confusions of the past, but the need to get things just right means that the beginning is continuously postponed) which affects certain personality types. Like me. Back in the pre-digital days I used to always have this problem with diaries and notebooks. I would spend so long preparing for the perfect diary experience that I never got chance to write what was happening in my life. Whenever I decide to write a book I spend so long lining up my pencils and notebooks that I never have time to write the book. I take so long devising filing systems, I never have opportunity to file things. And so the new computer sits there and looks clean, uncluttered, and unused. At the end of the day, isn't a perfectly formed blank page better than one covered in mistakes and crossing-outs. Of course it is.
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