It's nicely dull in the country. Its not quite warm, not quite wet, and
I am allergic to something in the vicinity - because my nose explodes
every time the door opens to the outside world. Something damp and
fungusy, probably. Hope it passes soon.

I have a new pet - a pot of fermenting milk. I was given a handful of
Kefir grains, a strange gelatinous mushroomy culture, which lurks in a
plastic pot in my suitcase. Every day I feed it fresh milk, and 24
hours later it gifts me a few glasses of fizzy sour mildly alcoholic
liquid which is oddly addictive. Its nice plain, nicer with a few
berries crushed into it, and now I'm looking for recipes...

Kefir is apparently well known and widely drunk in Russia and Poland -
all and any recipes from that region very welcome!

Back Up Back Up Back Up part 5

The really great discovery to emerge from the whole debacle was that
Mozy delivered on the promise.
I had all my files backed up, even the music files and the stuff I'd
saved just 12 hours before the disaster.

All I needed to do was download Mozy's interface onto the new baby and
log on (I'd forgotten my login details, but mozy emailed those to me
within 5 minutes)

As soon as I logged on I was asked if I wanted to register the new
computer and restore.
It took 24 hours, non stop, but I went home with all my data.

I will never, NOT NEVER, work without a continuous online, offsite
backup EVER again.

And neither should you!

So sleepy...

Didn't get much sleep last night - and now I think the anti-histamines
are kicking in....
- yes, "may cause drowsiness"

I was going to swim, but I think I'd better give that a miss, and get
some zzzzz instead.

Better still, I will be in the Stone Caravan for 10 days from Saturday
night onwards - that's the longest stretch in over a year, and the first
in (cross fingers) warm weather.

grrrrr

I have insect bites on my feet the size of cupcakes. That's the price of
walking through the park at dawn and dusk, watching the geese settle on
the lake. There are beasties lurking in the grass, which leap out and
chomp on my exposed skin.

I look down at my puffy ankles and think "this is what my limbs will look like 40 and more years from now, peeping from under a tartan
rug." It's like gazing down a time-telescope and rather sobering.

I am popping anti-histamines, to stop me from scratching down to the bone.

Back Up Back Up Back Up part 3

I walked into the kitchen carrying the remains of my laptop at 11.30pm.
The lights were all on, and there, at the table, tiptapping at a netbook
was the one person in the house best qualified to understand what had
just happened to me - my step-brother-in-law (I have a highly hyphenated
family) Simon, who 10 years ago guided me through the creation of my
first commercial website.

We fell on the corpse with ghoulish enthusiasm, and dissected it
together, discovering after a very few minutes (and a cup of tea) that
the harddrive had just about ceased to be.

No problem - I could slot a new hard drive in myself, what could that
cost? £30 - £50 max. We hopped on line to check - and learned that the
cheapest HD on offer for my X40 was $285, plus shipping, from the US.

Oh well, so this was going to be one of those expenses failures - and
there was still no promise that I could restore the data after the event.

At 12.30 I crashed as suddenly as the computer, just about hitting the
spare bed on the way down.

I slept surprisingly well - because there was one spectacular upside to
our autopsy.
.
We managed to get the harddrive turning for all of 5 minutes before it
went for eternity into that dark night which awaits us all. And five
minutes was just enough to snatch the finished draft and splat it onto a
borrowed thumb drive.

Everything else might be gone, I might not have the means to edit or
send it - but the script was safe.

Back Up Back Up Back Up part 2

Now - here's where synchronicity comes in.

Until last week I had a fairly limited back-up via Mozy
<http://mozy.com>. It was free, but limited to 2GB, so I just set up to
copy the crucial bits (work in progress, admin etc).

Then, out of the blue I realised how much I would miss the other 30 odd
GB of stuff - pictures, music, etc, and signed up for the paid option,
at $5 a month.
For days the laptop chuntered away to itself, uploading all my rubbish
to mozy's servers, bit by bit, until early last week it flashed up COMPLETE.

Talk about timing!

So, on that last leg of the delayed train into darkest Hereford, I was
left with 4 questions:

1.) Had I been on-line in the morning, between 10 and 11, to ensure that
the Film draft was backed up with the rest? (Mozy runs in the
background every morning - no connection, no backup)

2.) Would Mozy live up to its promises and allow me to restore all the
files it had so laboriously backed up a week earlier?

3.) Was my baby repairable or would I have to buy yet another little
machine to save my life?

4.) And just how long would all this take?

Back Up Back Up Back Up Back Up

So this is how it goes.

Thursday. 10.00pm - Finish draft - the very first time in 18 months
that I get to the end of my character's story without scratching my
head and thinking "I know what they are doing but not why the freak
they would!"

I stare into the darkness of the park with a sort of exhausted wonder.

Friday. 7.30am. Overslept. Understandable. Shower, pack, get to
work, planning to clean up the formatting at lunch time, and email the
copy to my first line editor before she heads off for the weekend (she
asked for a copy for her long and dull train journey on Saturday.)

Friday. 12.00pm. Team lunch. I let slip that I have finished the
draft, and several glasses of prosecco get ordered. Nice. Very nice.
And earned. But the clean up doesn't happen, naturally enough.

Friday. 4.00pm. Start cleaning up. Rush job comes in - we need to
create a sales brochure by midday Monday, and I have a train to catch
at 7.00pm. I get stuck into to Adobe InDesign to create the
template. this is what I am paid for, this is what allows me to take
the long lunch breaks on quiet days and get the writing done.

Friday. 5.00pm. The office wifi is down. This makes it impossible
to email the draft over before I leave for the station. I call my
editor. She disappointed but sweet.

Friday. 6.00pm. I leave the office and head to Paddington.

Friday. 7.00pm. No train.

Friday. 7.30pm. Still no train.

Friday. 7.31pm! Train, yay - only 16 minutes late, and they can't
leave me stranded in South Wales if we miss the connection. Can they?

Friday. 9.15pm. Oh yes they can....

Friday 9.30pm. Never mind. There's another train in an hour which
will get me *almost* all the way home. And I have done all the
formatting on the draft!

Friday 10.30pm And here it is! And I still have a hour's juice on
the laptop.

Friday 10.45pm. BANG.

My laptop is DEAD. TERMINAL. NO MORE. GONE WEST. TIT'S UP.
DECEASED.

And all my lovely data with it.....

To be continued....

did it did it did it

Made the deadline *and* finally made sense of the 3rd act.
There is, for the first time in over a year, a coherent version of the
film on my hard drive.
Just in time for the collapse of the European film industry, but what
the hey.

Afterwards I lay on the beanbag in St James Park in the dark, listening
to invisible geese on the invisible lake, and the clock on Horseguards
striking 10.

No coffee in my coffee!

I made a Thermos of coffee before I left the house for the 30 minute
climb to the cottage - but seem to have arrived with a thermos of hot
water and milk. Yeuch
I can remember spooning the coffee - but into what?
No popping to the corner shop for a jar of instant, and all the old
stuff got thrown out last week- I'm pretty much screwed.

I don't think I'll last more than another 2 hours without hot strong
java....

Jumping around a script

One of the problems of fine tuning the outline for a movie are the
sudden shifts of time and place.

I mean - I just spent 30 intense minutes immersing myself in two lovers,
having a soul-scarifying last conversation in an iced-up Berlin cafe, in
1947 - and now I have to decompress enough to dive into an action
sequence in African sunlight seven years earlier.

I need more coffee.
(No gin for at least another 10 hours!)

've just realised - I do more 'cooking' at work than at home

My locker drawer is full of knives, lemons, pepper, stock powder, soy
sauce, the office fridge is full of broad beans, kale, onions, rhubarb,
yoghurt.
When I open the mug cupboard a pile of Chinese takeaway boxes* threatens
to topple onto my head.

(*These are the best storage boxes I have ever encountered. These are at
least 3 years old, and still going strong; practically indestructible in
a freezer or a microwave, and all of about 10p each from on the
Chinatown supermarkets).

So - lunch today was a courgette, kale, celery, spring onion and
coriander soup.
I shredded all the veg, packed them in the box to steam in the microwave
for 3 minutes, then added stock, soy sauce, lime juice, more coriander,
pepper...
Desert was pineapple - half price in the market today.

It's getting to the stage where I might as well have the weekly veg box
delivered direct to the office!

My boss must be getting nervous everytime I head to the cottage

In the last 7 months I have been:

a.) trapped overnight on a train by a downed electrical line, finally
reaching home at 6am, after 11 hours on a train, 1 hour on an open
platform at 2 am, and 2 hours queuing in freezing fog with 700 other
exhausted passengers for a taxi.
Made it into the office by midday, and pretty much sleep-walked through
the day.
The Good News - I was entitled to a 100% refund on the ticket!
The Bad News - the ticket only cost £12 to begin with.

b.) trapped for 24 hours by snow

c.) quarantined for a week after exposure to Swine Flu...

He must wonder what possible disaster (wind, flood, meteor strike or
mutiny) will strike our small but hardy community next.

Luckily, this week, the train is only running 33 minutes late - and the
refund on the delay is a slightly more proportionate £25.00

Swallow free

All gone - except for the one who didn't make it.

I found her wedged between the two frames of the half open sash window.
It took several minutes of window wiggling to free the tiny corpse. Then
I removed the empty nest, and started to scrub the stairs clean of
swallow poo.

This is the last year I will host the nursery; I have pinned a mesh
screen over all the open windows, so that air can circulate where
fledging can not.

My niece told me she wants to be a pirate.
A fierce girl pirate. In a hat.
She is two.
I am soooo proud!

Rus V Urbs - snoozing

The one thing the city cannot offer is long sweet deep uninterrupted sleep.

The stone caravan is noisy enough; stream, wind, hawks, mice enjoying
midnight skinny dips in my sink, swallows, helicopters - surprisingly
often, sporadic gunfire, even, when the wind is in the right quarter,
the sound of an artillery range. It can be very light - full moon in
June means 24 hours of bright light streaming into the window. There
are definitely nights up there when I don't sleep well, and have to
resort to the radio (rewound every 20 minutes or so) or a book by
torchlight.

But there are also days and nights when I hit that deep cool white
double bed under the eaves, and stretch out in the happy knowledge that
I will sleep 12 hours through. Longer, if necessary

I always arrive there with a sleep debt to pay - because a night of
sleep in the city is like zeno's arrow, never quite reaching the
target. 300 hundred people sleeping, snoring, partying, peeing,
weeping, throwing up, within 200 yards of your bed, street lights
winking on and off, trains, planes, automobiles, the hum of a hundred
fridges, the sizzle of a hundred charging phones, the drip of a
hundred taps... and the 6am alarm, drawing you out only the almost
empty street to start the day all over again.

Here's to lying in bed today, paying off debts

Every ounce of effort to reach, repair and heat the Stone Caravan is
worth it, for an hour in the company of an surprisingly acrobatic toad.

Wednesday Night: - 4 Dry Martinis and a kiss in Piccadilly Circus

Thursday Night: - I baked rhubarb with orange zest and ginger.
It's cooling down on the window sill.
I'll eat it for breakfast.

Popped into a local picture framers to get a quotation for mounting a
map for my boss.

Like many of the businesses in West Kensington this is owned by a
Iranian - and as I spread out the map, I admired the beautiful lute he
moved aside.

This, he said, is a Tar <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_%28lute%29>,
made of mulberry wood, with goatskin, deer antler, camel bone and sheepgut.

And he played it for me, and audience of one in a quiet little workshop
in West London.

A moments silence for the passing of a piece of Old London

The pie shop in Greenwich is gone.

Lunch in Greenwich used to be Pie, Mash, Peas and a bottle of beer at
Goddards.
It was always crowded and always scrummy.

I knew that it had closed after 70 years (The Goddard family is still
baking wholesale- http://www.pieshop.co.uk/about-goddards/)
<http://www.pieshop.co.uk/about-goddards/>

What I didn't know was the shop (interior circa 1680) would have been
gutted (all save the listed stair case) and a chain burger restaurant
cloned into the site.

I will never (willingly) set foot in an ODEON cinema again.

I went yesterday to the drear gulag which is the Odeon+IMAX in Greenwich
Peninsula- a breeze block silo, 10 minutes by bus from the nearest tube
station on a traffic with a handful of chain outlets (Nandos, Prezzo
etc) at its foot, their windows looking out on one side at a rubbish
burning plant, on the other over a litter strewn carpark.

The foyer was dirty, and worn, none of the screens opened on time,
leading to long queues for the escalators, the place was scattered with
notices apologising for the broken air-con, broken lights etc etc. I
got to my seat at last, the film started ... and the emergency lights -
bare florescent bulbs- came on overhead and stayed on for the entire
film. If it hadn't taken 90 minutes to get there, I would have walked out.

As it was, I stayed, and squinted at the screen, and even enjoyed the film.
Then headed out to the loos - just in time to see them *both* being
closed for cleaning. So another 10 minute queue, in preparation for a
long bus ride.

Odeon still haven't acknowledged my last letter/email- so I expect
bugger all this time.
I'll just take my £10-£20 a week elsewhere.

Slug sweeties

It rained in the night - heavily enough to flatten most of grass in the
yard.

The damp brings the slugs out. Lots and lots of slugs. Shiny pitch
black ones, as big as my thumb. Hundreds of them.
In one square metre of turf I counted 11 of them, curled and twisted
like half sucked licorice chews.