Category: First world problems

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New Glasses

Something remarkable happened today: I got up feeling quite upbeat, almost chipper even, or at least not as down as I usually do. I don’t know why – I didn’t get any more sleep than usual, woke up at my current ‘normal’ time, about half past four (though I had gone to bed a bit earlier, after falling asleep on the sofa in front of the telly). I listened to quite a nice, cheerful play on the radio, which was engaging, if a bit soppy, read some nice posts on Facebook – nothing that made me too angry – (well, except for one woman ‘boasting’ about her and her husband’s new French-made blue UK passports – I refrained from saying that I’m grateful my burgundy EU one doesn’t have to be replaced until 2028 – though sadly it no longer conveys the rights and privileges it used to). But apart from that, nothing too irritating or depressing. And I did some puzzles on my phone, even thought about going to the beach for the sunrise, but decided against it because it was raining, and stayed in bed till after the heating came on at half past six.

I picked up my new glasses yesterday, but I’m still wearing my old readers, which is a bit daft. I think part of me was thinking I’d keep the new ones downstairs and the old ones upstairs, but as my PC is upstairs and I look at my phone a lot in bed, that doesn’t make much sense. I think they need to be consigned to ‘emergency’ status and I’ll have to continue carrying the new ones up and down stairs with me.

The optician was quite surprised when I told her that I wanted reading glasses as well as varifocals, but I just don’t like using varifocals for close work, and especially for screen work. I don’t know, maybe the gradient is in the wrong place, or I wear them in the wrong place, or hold my head at the wrong angle. I get very stressed in eye tests, especially the bit where they keep changing the lenses and asking which one is clearer. It’s like everything else I suppose: what if I say the wrong thing? I’ll end up with the wrong glasses and spend a lot of money and get more headaches and have to keep squinting all the time (specially if I don’t wear the new ones). But I can never trust my own judgement, and I panic when I’m asked to make choices, even with something like that where nobody but me can say whether it’s right or wrong – worse, even, because no one can correct me so I have to live with it.

The shed is up now, but it’s not in the place where I want it – which is where the shell of the old one is still standing. I haven’t put any stuff into the new one yet, except the shelves, because it will need to be moved at some point.

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The Sixth Age

The rain has stopped, the sun is out, but I can still hear the wind – which isn’t good, because tomorrow my son and daughter-in-law are coming to put up the new garden shed. Will it stand in this wind? Anybody’s guess. I hope so, because we get storms every winter.

I have been gradually emptying out the old shed over the last two weeks. There’s not much stuff left in there, and I’m planning to get it out today or tomorrow morning before they get here. That’s the plan.

I was talking a while ago about the Madwoman in the Attic years, those times when there were issues in the future that were going to resolve everything (if positive, like getting a job, finding a new lover, travelling, publishing a book, living by the seaside) or were being ignored (if scary, like settling down and finding a home for all my Stuff). In the last few years, I have come to accept that the former group are either never going to happen (the job and the lover), or have happened without really resolving things as I’d hoped they would (the travelling, the books and living at the seaside – though I don’t regret any of them, especially the last). In fact it’s been the settling down and finally having a place that feels like ‘home’ which has been the saving grace for me, though managing the Stuff is a big issue which still needs to be resolved.

The first year and a half of living in the flat near the beach felt in many ways like a continuation of the travelling years – or maybe the first year did, because the last six months was taken up with the stress of house buying, emptying out the old house in Bedford, and arranging for all the Stuff to come to rest here. Then the next year was taken up with dealing with cancer. So I suppose I could say I’ve had three years to date of adjusting to the ways my life is now. People talk about ‘the Third Age’, but in Shakespearean terms, I see this as the Sixth Age – the penultimate one.  

Why am I thinking in these terms today? A couple of weeks ago my therapist asked me what I want to do with my future, what I would do if money was no object. But money isn’t the problem – I have enough money for anything I need, and I can’t think of anything I want that would require money I don’t have. If I came into more money unexpectedly, I would probably give it to my children, or maybe put it in trust for my grandchildren. Perhaps I’ll have some nice holidays when travel becomes a possibility again, though I’ll never be able to travel as freely as I did before.

I spoke too soon about the weather. Rain and hail are driving against the window. Shed emptying, dismantling and erecting might not be possible this weekend after all.   

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Tackling… a Metaphor

Today Backup and Sync tells me that it can’t sync 7107 items, but it is syncing 7130 of 18221. Or something like that. The numbers change every time I look. But I think this is a good thing, because yesterday it couldn’t sync 20837, which I think means that the numbers of files it wants to sync has gone down, and I take that to mean that some of the files which were formerly on the google drive are no longer there – so my deletions have achieved something. But, the space is still full. Is this because of what’s being uploaded from my phone?

Why do I keep harping on about this? Because I’m sure there has to be a solution somewhere, somehow. It’s a problem I’ve ignored for a long time, but always assumed there was a simple solution. Now I’ve decided to try and resolve it, it’s turning out to be a lot more challenging than just deleting some old emails and photos.

I have just taken what feels like the nuclear option. I have disconnected my account from Backup and Sync. But is that really what I wanted to do? Does this mean that I can’t now access my files on Google Drive, even to delete them? What does that mean for my emails? And my photos? And sharing files between my PC and other devices?

I have written an awful lot of words on this topic (I’m guessing about 4,000, but I haven’t checked). It’s not the only thing going on in my life at the moment – I can walk away at any time and forget about it for hours on end. But it feels symbolic. If the issue is about stuff lying around on my electronic ‘desktop’, isn’t that very similar to the state of my physical desktop, my study, my whole house? Things which have just been left to lie where they are, no real system of filing or tidying away, just overwhelming clutter? And what about my mental state – isn’t it all a perfect metaphor for that too?

I have been ignoring the messages relating to my emails for years, with only occasional bursts of enthusiasm for going through and deleting them when the warnings become too dire. My old Yahoo email currently has 7,526 unread emails – that’s right, unread, not undeleted. But taking yesterday as a typical example, I received 12 new ones, of which two, relating to an online order for cat food, are of significance. What about the rest? None of them are actually malicious or a nuisance (unless there were others that got sent directly into the spam folder), they’re mostly from companies I have accounts with or organisations that send out newsletters I don’t want to unsubscribe from because you never know when there might be something that I’m interested in. There’s even one from someone who wants to tell me how to stop procrastinating – I might unsubscribe from that if I ever get round to it.

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Tackling the… Whatever

To recap, at the end of yesterday’s instalment I mentioned how I had realised that the photos I was carefully downloading to a folder I had created on my hard drive, and then deleting from Google Photos to create space on my Google Drive, were being grabbed back onto Google Drive overnight by the naughty Data Pixies (or perhaps I should call them the Google Gnomes, or Data Demons?) Anyway, every day I was returning to find the inevitable messages about my cloud space being 99% full.

So I started looking into Windows 10’s ‘Backup and sync’ feature, which told me that I could select the folders which I wanted to be backed up to the cloud – which was news to me, because I didn’t realise anything was being automatically up to anywhere from my computer. I’m very old school in that I assume it’s my personal responsibility to arrange to keep my important files backed up somewhere, as was drilled into me many decades ago, before the idea arose that computers could ever be accessed directly by mere mortals who needed protection from their own folly and carelessness.

With some effort (to be honest, I can’t remember exactly how I did it, and just had to Google it again, when I discovered that I needed to click on the icon at the bottom right of the screen near the volume/mute symbol, and then go to Preferences, though I’m sure that’s not how it happened last time), I came to a window with the header: ‘Choose folders to continuously back up to Google Drive’ and underneath, the names of three folders with tick boxes next to them: ‘Desktop’, ‘Documents’ and ‘Pictures’. I unticked them, rubbed my hands with glee, and deleted some more files, till I got down to roughly 10GB again.

Problem solved? Not exactly.

Next day, there it was again. Google Drive 99% full, 15GB of 15GB used. ‘If you run out of space you won’t be able to upload files or send or receive emails. Delete some files or upgrade your storage.’

When I listed the files in descending order of size, I saw on the list not only photos which had been bounced back and forth, but also a large number of music files and some Powerpoint presentations from an art history course I did about five years ago. In a previous purge, a year or two ago, when I was going through and deleting large emails, I had downloaded them and hidden them safely in a folder named ‘art stuff’, located on… wait for it…  the desktop. .

Every day I go into the ‘Desktop’ folder on Google Drive, and delete some more files – but there’s a limit to how many I can select at a time without causing the computer to seize up completely. I swear I can hear the data crackling back and forth. It is a huge job, it is mind-numbing and where the f…heck is it filling up from now?

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Tackling the Chaos – the Saga Continues

I started yesterday talking about the latest part of the Google drive saga, with the discovery of the ‘Desktop’ folder, which was inside the ‘My computer’ folder, which was inside the ‘Computers’ folder. There were two other folders in the ‘My computer’ folder, one called ‘Documents’ and one called ‘Pictures’. I opened ‘Documents’ and it contained one other folder, called ‘Bridport’, which rang a vague bell, but when I opened it, it was empty. I tried drilling down through some of the folders in ‘Desktop’ too, and found that they were also empty.

It was very puzzling, but I went back to the list of files in descending order by size. At the top were some music files, which I didn’t want to delete because I regularly access them from my phone, but I had a go at deleting some of the photo files again. I started getting warning messages telling me that the files would be deleted ‘…from all devices…’ which spooked me a bit. Did this mean they would be deleted from my hard drive ‘Desktop’ as well? I decided to leave that until I could confirm that they were still there, and went back to copying all the photos from my phone to my computer and then deleting them from Google photos, and the ones from the latest phone backup from my phone into the ‘USB devices and SD cards folder’. This got the storage down to about 11GB again, and I left it at that.

The next day when I restarted the computer, the usual messages about my cloud space being 99% full came up. I opened Google Drive and went to the Desktop folder. Inside it was a complete list of the folders on my computer desktop, including the ‘Backup photos’ folder which I had specifically created to save the photos I’ve been downloading and deleting from Google Drive to save space. I opened it, and it contained files which I had created only the day before.

At this point, I need to explain how I organise the files on my computer. My virtual desktop is pretty similar to the state of my physical desktop (and you’ve seen photos of that). Although I am quite organised in having folders for important stuff: individual projects, my blog, poems, accounts, novel, etc etc, I create them on the Desktop and shove the lower folders and various files inside them – although I also have a tendency to save files to the desktop ‘temporarily’, so there are always quite a few odd documents or photos lying around which I don’t sort out, so that the whole thing becomes a bit of a mess, and I rely heavily on the ‘recently accessed files’.

And it seemed as if not just my phone, but all the files from my desktop (in other words, all the files I had put – and was continuing to put – on my terabyte of hard drive) were being automatically backed up to the 15gb of cloud space… tbc

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Tackling the Chaos: Memories Lost and Overwhelmed

Clicking through photos again to track down another one which came up on my desktop recently, I thought it was from Sête in Provence, but it was a little further east along the coast, at Le Grau du Roi in the Camargue, taken on a very grey and damp Spring Equinox in 2012 (of course). Which reminds me of my late friend Douglas Jeal, who, after hearing my tales, went to the south of France at around the same time the following year, then grumbled at me because the weather was horrible. What did he expect? Well, he had lived in Barcelona for a while, which has its own microclimate, so I suppose he can’t be blamed for thinking it might be similar  a few hundred miles along the Mediterranean coast.

What else does that remind me of? A few days ago the image on my desktop was of a map of that corner of the Med, a mural on the wall of Bordeaux station, where I was stranded for a couple of hours or so during a train strike when I was en route from Brittany to northern Spain. Something piqued my interest when I saw it again, but I couldn’t remember what it was, so I opened the file in Photoshop to check, and still can’t see why. It’s quite a poor quality photo – from an old, pre-Smart Nokia phone – so zooming in hasn’t helped. Maybe it will come to me.

I’ve mentioned before about the Magic Refilling Data pot, and how my efforts at clearing space on my google Drive by downloading photos from Google photos to my hard drive and then deleting them from Google photos were being thwarted because every morning my phone was being backed up to another file on Google Drive. Over several days (because it takes a long time to select and delete that many photos and my PC is four years old and quite creaky – and also it was refilling again every morning with the ones I hadn’t backed up and removed from my phone) I managed to get all the photos up to the end of 2020 from my phone, onto my hard drive, and removed from the backup file on Google drive. The day came when I logged on to my computer, opened my Gmail, and was informed that I had used 11 Gb of my 15Gb allocation. That lasted a couple of hours before the messages started to appear telling me that my Google Drive was full again.

I listed all files in descending file-size, and found that the photos I’d already deleted were still appearing on the list. By clicking on each file, I was given a side panel with details, including the folder where the file was located. Clicking on the name of the folder led me up the tree to the folder where it was, and so on until I reached a folder called ‘Desktop’, and above that, another one called ‘Computers’… tbc

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Boring, Boring, Boring

Yesterday I experienced something I haven’t been aware of in a long time: boredom. I finished bringing my financial spreadsheet up to date, but didn’t feel as satisfied as I expected. The afternoon plays on Radio 4 and 4 Extra respectively were: the first episode of a three-part adaptation of ‘Tess of the Durbervilles’ (well done, but hard to avoid the sense of impending doom) and a thirty-year-old drama about a divorced sixty-something woman with breast cancer who is reunited with an old admirer, has a mastectomy and moves to Australia (either breast cancer treatment has improved a lot since the early 1990s, or the writer didn’t have much idea of what he was writing about – no chemo or radiotherapy, just straight to the knife).

Ironically, I also listened to a programme on boredom, but I didn’t take much of it in.

I’m getting bored with the jumper I’ve been knitting, the one I pulled down because it didn’t fit, and I haven’t quite caught up to where it was before. I’m not looking forward to doing the sleeves, which are going to be fiddly, but I want to get it done so I can wear it at least once before the weather gets too warm. If current trends continue, it may be even smaller by next winter (think about it).

Which reminds me, on this morning’s weather forecast they said that it will get a lot warmer, maybe as high as 17o  this week, which would be white and green within a week!

I saw a picture on a Facebook crochet group last week of a blanket with an amazing spiral pattern. There was no pattern attached, and I couldn’t work out from the photo how it was done, so I Googled it, and found a simple technique for making a four-colour spiral – not quite the same, but still interesting. I made a start with four colours of cotton yarn leftover from last year’s weather blanket (I have changed to using a different, lighter yarn this year), and it’s given me the spark of an idea.

I also saw a cartoon on Facebook yesterday titled something like: ‘The Mind/Body problem’, showing a man sitting on a sofa, with a thought bubble coming from his head saying ‘Get up!’ and one from his body saying ‘Nope!’ or words to that effect – exactly summing up my mood, but I can’t remember where it came from.

But for this morning I have some editing – which will be interesting and, being a commission for someone else, takes priority over housework, decluttering, study-tidying or any of those other multitudes of Jobs That Needs Doing.

I keep thinking of things I could do, hobbies that I could take up or restart, projects that I would enjoy getting stuck into, most of which I already have the materials and equipment for, or could easily get hold of online. Books to read, jigsaws to do, projects to complete, all at my fingertips, but can I be bothered?

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Not a Competition

In a chat on Zoom, I mentioned that I suspect I’m going to be facing my second consecutive birthday in lockdown, and got this response from one participant:

‘We all are!’

‘That depends on when your birthday is’ I stuttered, not having expected this somewhat aggressive response.

‘Well, none of us were allowed parties!’ she shot back.

There I go again, showing my self-pity. I should know by now to keep my mouth shut. But the only reason I’d been thinking about it was that next week it will be my sister’s first birthday in lockdown – last year she and her husband went for a holiday in Devon, and for my birthday I was looking forward to a canal holiday on a narrow-boat with my son and daughter in law. When it had to be cancelled, I thought: ‘oh well, not the end of the world, it’s just another day, I’m used to being on my own at home after all’ etc etc, but on the day itself it hit me harder than I’d expected. It was near the beginning of the first lockdown, and over the last few weeks I’ve been wondering whether this current situation will still be in place by then. But, first-world-problems, what do birthdays matter when people are facing much worse problems: illness and death, losing loved ones, losing jobs?  Maybe this lady had problems I wasn’t aware of, and my remark about my birthday was insensitive?

‘It’s not a competition’ my therapist said when I told her about it. ‘Whatever’s going on in her life, that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to feel sad! And instead of self-pity, why not think of it as “self-care”?’

Still, I think I should keep my mouth shut. It’s safer. Which is ironic, because as a child, and even later when I was a young woman, I was always being told to speak up for myself (except when I said things the other parties didn’t want to hear, as in this case, and how was I supposed to anticipate when that might happen?) Better to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself, when to share them might invoke other people’s anger, and hence my shame, or even laughter, and my humiliation – or sometimes both shame and humiliation at the same time.

Yet I come on here and talk about my feelings every day. Why is that? I’ve been through this before – because I can, with a near certainty that no one is going to respond.

I have a friend who occasionally contacts me on What’s App, who has severe physical disabilities and is in a far worse position than me. Sometimes she amazes me with her positivity and resilience, but this week she was very low. I tried to tell her how I felt for her, I didn’t belittle her suffering, I told a funny story against myself, I said I’m here if she ever wants to share. What else could I do? It’s not a competition.

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Home to Roost

In my study, but once again, Microsoft decided it needed to reconfigure my version of Office, so I had to wait. I spent the time picking some more books to go downstairs on the new shelves, and looking for more yarn to match the cardigan (or maybe it will be a blanket) I started crocheting two days ago, when I realised the fair isle jumper was going to be too tight, so I gave up on it till I decide whether I’m going to pull it back to the armpits and do it again, or leave it unfinished like so many other things I’ve started in my life.


Then I felt the urge to listen to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Judgement of the Moon and Stars’, which I’ve been listening to on cassette in the kitchen, and I thought I must have uploaded onto the PC when I was doing that a few months ago. I couldn’t find it, but I did find the files for her album ‘Hejira’, and played ‘Amelia’, which got me into a sad and thoughtful mood, which wasn’t necessarily where I wanted to go.


By that time, Office was reconfigured and Word was open. I suspect it’s now reconfiguring every time I restart the PC (which should be every day, but I must admit sometimes I forget to switch it off properly and it stays in hibernation till the next morning). I don’t use the PC much in the daytime after I’ve finished blogging, now that I’ve got the laptop downstairs, where the wifi’s better and it’s warmer – I don’t have the radiator switched on in here because it’s under the window, behind the desk and printer. Ironic to think that I bought the laptop at the end of 2019 so I could take it out and sit in cafes to write – one of many small ironies of the last twelve months.


Maybe what I’m doing here is reconfiguring my mind every morning. It’s a thought.


In telling the story of the Madwoman in the Attic, I flitted around quite a bit chronologically, and I think I may have missed out completely the time in Prague. I started going through the blogs from that time about three years ago, after I finished the first draft of ‘The Long Way Back’, but I gave up on it quite quickly. Maybe that should be a task for this year – or would be, if I was setting myself tasks, which I’m not.


The gist, I suppose, of the Madwoman idea, was that through those limbo years until I moved into this house in October 2016, the Stuff was always hanging around in the dusty corners of my mind, along with the knowledge that at some time the house would be sold, and it would come home to roost, but also I would be in a position to buy a permanent home for it (and me). And yet, although I’m here, and it is too, the chaos remains unresolved.

Amelia, Joni Mitchell

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Existential Choices

…I wanted stay in the flat in the Art Nouveau building with its courtyard and rickety lift, stroll to the café for breakfast every morning, and then along the river to the tram stop and ride somewhere, maybe across the bridge and up the hill to Buda Castle, and look down on the city. Walk down through the gardens of Gellért Hill, maybe go to the baths (I never did that) or walk back into Pest across the Elisabeth Bridge, rummage through the flea market and find a café to sip coffee Viennoise or hot chocolate, maybe even a glass of sweet white wine with my cake…

After I started that sentence yesterday, I kept thinking of the lines from Joni Mitchell’s  ‘A Free Man in Paris’:

‘…If I had my way, I’d walk out that door and
wander down the Champs Elysée,
going from café to cabaret…’

From ‘A Free Man in Paris’ by Joni Mitchell

Then I had to play the song, and after rummaging through the box of cassettes in the study, I found it in the sideboard drawer, right under the music centre, first place I should have looked.

Ah well. I never went to any cabarets, but I did sit in a lot of cafes.

Three weeks after leaving Budapest, I walked up the complex of white ramps to the roof of the Opera House overlooking Oslo harbour, thinking again about the future, and ‘home’, about the need to make a living, and the responsibilities of selling and buying houses – and about the weight of the past, the ‘stuff’ still waiting for me in the old house, which would need to be sorted out and disposed of and/or moved to… some indeterminate future place. In another three weeks I would be back in England, and then what? I was going back to live with my daughter, and I knew there was £20k waiting for me in the bank from the balance of what I’d had from Ex-Hubby before I left England, that should keep me for a while, until the house was sold, and/or I could find (against all past experience) a job, and in the meantime I could write, and one day maybe start to make a living from that? But buying a house would mean committing to one place, and the thought of all the stuff from the attic and elsewhere banged around in my head, a burden dragged around behind me like Mother Courage’s cart.  What about going back to Budapest and living and writing there, then what would happen to the stuff, I couldn’t take it with me, so where would it go? If the house sale went through in the next twelve months, say, it would all have to be resolved

Once again, there were existential choices to be made, and the whole point of running away was to escape them and come back with new ideas and fresh opportunities, a new path to follow, but inside nothing had changed, and I felt no closer to finding my future.