The End Is Nigh

At some point in the not too distant future I will be gone. The end is very close now. Those things which used to be quick and easy now seem to take a mountain of effort and an aeon of time. I must confess that I face the future with a degree of fear and a great deal of trepidation. One hears all sorts of stories about what happens next and I have yet to find anyone who says that life after Windows XP is a better, brighter thing. But Vista awaits and I can no more escape its clutches than I can escape tax ... or death. Having made the necessary (and if you could experience the huffing, puffing, creaking and groaning of my current set-up you would know just how necessary it was) decision to get a new computer I have kept putting the deed off: best to wait until after the summer; I will have more time after Marsden; wait until the stock market recovers ..... that kind of thing. There is obviously a psychological reason for this - something akin to taking your dog on its final journey to the vets. You know you can buy yourself a new puppy but you will have all that wiping up and cleaning up and drying up to face. And all my friends who have already experienced Vista tell me as messy puppies go, Vista could win prizes. I am due to go to the shop this afternoon to make the purchase. That way I can keep the old girl going a bit longer while I toilet train the new model. But it is raining. And there is an episode of Diagnosis Murder I have never seen on TV this afternoon. Perhaps I will leave it until tomorrow.

Old, Slow, Worn Out and Unable To Multi-Task

Much of my time has been taken up recently with the arrangements for my surprise 60th birthday party. There have been endless lists to make : lists of people to invite, lists of food to buy or prepare, lists of lists to consult and update. I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing like planning a 60th birthday party to make you feel 70 years old. One such list did, however, give rise to one of my finest little jokes for a very long time. We were sat in the Rock Tavern on Friday night and Jenny had just said that she would prepare some potatoes for my surprise party. "Chips" said I more in hope than expectation. "Certainly not" she replied. "OK" said I with an appropriate degree of disgruntlement, "I'll cook some myself". "You can't do that she replied", to which I replied (are you ready for this, concentrate, it's a really good one) : "It's my party and I'll fry if I want to, fry if I want to ...."

Part of the problem is that I seem to be getting slower as I get older. For the last few days I have been doing some heavy practice for the surprise birthday present from Mark and Chrissy which will be an ascent of several mountains in the Lake District. I decided to be sensible and work my way carefully through some staged training and acclimatisation : and I dedicated this week to short strolls up and down the road with walking boots on my feet (the main expedition isn't until next week so I have loads of time to practice things like bivouacking, trekking, rock-climbing and all that sort of thing. I thought I was doing really well, marching up the road with the kind of pace that even the Grand Old Duke Of York would have been proud of. And then a little old lady - in her mid eighties at least - complete with two Scottie dogs said to me "excuse me love, do you mind if we pass you" and I realised that I had been holding her up for ages.

I managed to walk about half a mile this morning and then had to come home because I was worn out. My back was aching, my right foot was beset by a severe pain of unknown aetiology, the rib I cracked a few weeks ago whilst performing a splendid death fall during a game of Murder started to flair up again, my throat was lined with sandpaper, and my nose was running. I came home and collapsed into the chair and said to Xan "I feel worn out". I got his standard reply which was "don't be such an old woman". Thinking of the little old lady with the Scottie dogs I thought "chance would be a fine thing".

The other thing that seems to have evaporated from my list of personal skills is my ability to do more than one thing at once. I am not talking about fairly complex things such as simultaneously translating from French to English whilst reading a newspaper whilst drinking a cup of coffee (I used to watch the translators at the European Commission do this and was always impressed with their ability) : I mean relatively basic things. I have been meaning to do a blog posting since Sunday but my inability to multi-task has got in the way. On Sunday we were all treated to a most sumptuous Sunday lunch by Elaine - every element of which was a true delight (except the Yorkshire Puddings Elaine, except to Yorkshire Puddings). But when I got home I discovered that I could not let this wonderful meal digest and type at the same time. I got up early on Monday to write, but discovered that I could not think and shave at the same time. I started to worry that soon I would not be able to breath and do anything at the same time. And then I realised that I could not worry and write at the same time.

However, none of this has anything to do with what I want to write about which is the perilous state of my computer. It has been playing up for some time now but I have never said anything in public about it because I still intended to try and sell it to Cousin Dave when I eventually got another one. Alas it has now got to such a state that I am going to have to do something about it. After all, it's about four years old which is on the dark side of middle age in computer terms. And it is dreadfully slow at doing anything these days. You could boil a kettle while it finds a web page and eat a four course lunch whilst it launches an application. In its youth it was as swift as an Olympic runner, now it wouldn't qualify for a Veterans Zimmer Frame Race. The truth is that it is getting worn out. The fan next to the CPU makes a dreadful noise, occasionally the screen transposes the colours so everything looks as though you have been on an LSD trip, and the mouse regularly dies and can only be brought back to life by slamming it down onto the desk from a considerable height. And when it was new it could run several programmes at once whilst it calculated pi to 10,000 places and made a reasonable slice of toast, but now it struggles to do two things at the same time. If you try to get it to archive my old e-mail while it checks out the latest football news it transmits its annoyance with a flicker and a frozen screen.

I complain about this endlessly to my wife and she keeps telling me to get a new computer. Until now I have resisted, after all it has been a good friend to me over the years. We've had some good times together and I've told it things I have never told anyone else. But today I realised that you can't afford to be sentimental . Difficult decisions have to be made sometimes. I will pop down to PC World tomorrow and see what is available. The truth is that when such things get old, slow, worn out and unable to multi-task they have to be disposed of. Don't they?

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First Loves Never Die

I will never forget my first love : what man will? The excitement, the expectation, the thrill, the realisation that you have progressed through a new portal of existence. And mine was a BBC Micro.

It was twenty-five years ago. The Beeb was not the first computer I had come into intimate contact with - we had an early Apple at work which was bolted to an old canteen trolley and wheeled between lecture rooms - but it was the first computer I had owned. Thus it was the first computer I could explore with abandon, the first computer I could share the early hours of the morning with, the first computer I could play with. Like all first loves, it was beautiful with its red and black keys and its fawn plastic case. Later computers were more sophisticated, more ergonomic, more practical, but the Beeb had that flush of impetuous style that only the young are capable of.

The things it could do were almost beyond imagination. It could justify type (this may not sound much but for some of my publications I used to do this manually by typing a piece, counting how many extra spaces would need to be added to each line to make the right-hand edge straight, and then re-typing the piece with the spaces in). It could construct crude pictures by putting together a complex pattern of the letter "x". It could play music, and - with the addition of a little programme - it could talk. It could play wondrous games such as "Elite", "Space Invaders" and the glorious "Mr Ed" (which I still occasionally dream about). You could programme it (actually you had to programme it because it could do nothing by itself). Within a few hours of it coming into my life I had taught it to type "Good Morning Alan" when I switched it on. The book said that you could teach it to use "morning", "afternoon" or "evening" as appropriate, but I never progressed that far.

My Beeb and I lived together for two or three years until I fell for an Amstrad 1512. This was newer, more powerful, more serious ....... but it wasn't the same. If you asked me to was lyrical over an Amstrad I couldn't. These thoughts and memories were brought into focus this morning by a leader in the Guardian entitled "in praise of the BBC Micro". It came as a bit of a shock to discover that others had experienced love affairs with the same Beeb. But I am not jealous. I am reminded of those lines from Cohen's "Sisters of Mercy"

And you won't make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened your night:

We weren't lovers like that and besides it would still be all right.

My Beeb is packed away in the loft space. I have not visited it for many years. But I will search it out and boot it up again. As they say, "first loves never die".