I spent my last half hour in bed this morning thinking about apostrophes, and how simple the rules are, and why do so many people have a problem with them, and how can I explain them to people? Actually, I’ve been thinking about it pretty much ever since, and still am.

Because the rules really aren’t that difficult, but I’m just terrible at explaining things, and that’s why I couldn’t be a teacher.

The first, and most common, reason for using an apostrophe is to show contraction – where some letters have been left out: aren’t, I’m, couldn’t.

The other reason (yes, there are only two), is to show possession: Fred’s brother, the cat’s whiskers. And the only part of this which is tricky is that for words that don’t end in S, you add ‘S, but for words that do end in S, it’s usual to put the apostrophe after the S. So, a maid who works for a lady is a lady’s maid, but a college for ladies is a ladies’ college. That’s it.

Most of the confusion comes from the tendency these days for people to throw an apostrophe at any word that ends in S (usually plurals) whether or not the context is to do with indicating possession. They don’t even do it consistently – like a chip shop advertising: fish, chips and pea’s. Why does peas warrant an apostrophe but not chips? They both end in S. Do they think peas is different because it has a vowel before the S? In which case, what about pies and pizza’s? Or even pie’s and pizzas?  

But oh for the days when only the signs outside fish and chip shops – or greengrocers – were affected. These days it happens everywhere – anything you read, not just on the internet but everywhere. There must have been three generations of English teachers since I learnt this 60 years ago, and somewhere down the line the transmission has broken down. And it makes me want to weep every time I see it.

I understand about language having to change, and I break ‘the rules’ in ways that would horrify my teachers, but I do it consciously, consistently, knowing the effect I want to achieve, what’s important and what isn’t. But this has no logic to it, no reason, no consistency. Why bother at all? Why not just abolish apostrophes altogether, as e e cummings did with capital letters, rather than chuck them in whenever you feel like it for no reason whatsoever?

Incidentally, a few paragraphs back, the mighty Word has inscribed a blue squiggly line under my use of it’s in it’s usual (and just did it again). It’s trying to tell me I need to use its – which I would, if I was showing possession. But I’m not. It’s is a contraction for it is, and interestingly it hasn’t underlined it that time.

Yes, I grant you that is the one time when apostrophe might become confusing. But it’s not that hard.

Today my computer informs me that:

There is insufficient memory or disk space. Word cannot display the requested font.

As far as I’m aware, I haven’t ‘requested’ any special font, I’ve just opened Word as I do every morning. I close the message, and the usual one about my cloud storage being full. The blank page appears in ‘draft’ format – the right-most of the format icons on the bottom tool bar. I click on the left-hand icon, which is apparently called ‘print view’, and the page appears in the normal format. This is the second time this has happened lately.

I check, just in case, on File Explorer, and note that my hard drive has 718 GB free out of 918 GB – in other words, oodles of spare capacity. I should really do something about the cloud space though, delete some more photos from Google photos, but it will only fill up again – it’s been like this since at least before I got my current phone, which regularly reminds me how many weeks it is since it’s been able to backup to the cloud – well over two years’ worth, if I remember correctly.

Speaking of which, I mentioned the other day that it was surprising that my rotating desk top photos didn’t include any from the last part of my journey. I decided to correct that, and had a look in the ‘Europe 2012’ file on my external hard drive, when I had a shock. This drive holds the contents of the old hard drive of my original laptop, made for me before I went travelling by an IT guy (met through those networking breakfasts) who advised me on a replacement laptop. He offered to take the old laptop off my hands and put the drive into a casing for an external hard drive, so I could keep all the data from the original laptop, and also use it as a backup drive. When I was travelling I backed up my photos, notes and blog posts onto it, and I still have it attached to my current PC, which is where I found the desk tops file. The shock came when I realised I didn’t have any folders at all for the later places: my last few days in Norway, then Hamburg, Amsterdam and Brussels. Nor did I have any backups of the ones taken in the following years including all the ones I took when I lived in Prague.

Those photos should all be on the laptop I used in those years, until the beginning of 2015, just before I moved here, when I got a new one (the one I spilt coffee over and replaced with this PC in 2017). Fortunately I still have that laptop which I took travelling, the one I call my Old, Old laptop. I’ve seen it – and had it working – in the last year. I’ve been looking for it for two days (well, on and off). It must be in this study somewhere…

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

Everything seems to be conspiring against me writing this morning – well, maybe not everything, but certainly Microsoft, which resents my determination not to pay for Office 365, but continue to use the version of Office which I bought in good faith ten years ago, and which I have always found perfectly adequate for my needs. In revenge, it periodically tells me it has to reconfigure Office, and this morning I sat in front of the screen for ages getting more and more irritated, and rapidly losing the will to live, let alone write – so much so that I’ve come downstairs and am using the laptop instead.
This isn’t an ideal solution, partly because it requires me to sit on the armchair with the laptop on (surprise, surprise) my lap, which is not healthy in terms of either my posture or my eyesight – both of which cause me problems at this stage in my life. The other issue is that I don’t have any version of MS Office on my laptop any more, because the free trial version of 365 has now expired, and I can’t install my old version because it’s on a CD and there is no CD drive (besides which, no doubt I would get the same ‘configuration’ problems, though it might be quicker because at least the wifi in the front room is better than the study).
So I’m trying to get to grips with Open Office, which I’m sure I’ll get my head around eventually, but at the moment I find myself missing some of the features I’m used to with the MS version – though this is more of an issue with Excel/Calc than it is with Word. This morning I’ve found out how to insert the current date, but I’ve just noticed that I can’t see the wordcount without using the tool bar. That’s going to be annoying.
I was going to say more about the Madwoman in the Attic this morning, but I’ve been distracted by all these irritations and now may just fill in the rest of this post with moaning.
My poor cat joined me in the study just as I’d decided to give up on waiting for Office to configure and come downstairs. I explained to her what I was doing, but she hasn’t come down yet, even though I’ve been here for half an hour. Probably curled up asleep on her special chair. If she was here, of course, she would be trying to sit on my lap – which is currently occupied by… yes that’s correct. And, in another non-surprising surprise move, she has now just walked into the room – when I’m thinking of winding this up and going back upstairs, because that’s where the scanner is, and I’ve just remembered about a photograph I found among the stuff in the study, which I took on Cape Cod in June 1996, almost a quarter of a century ago. Does the message still apply?

I decided this morning that if I ever publish another book, on the back cover, under the blurb, where real books have glowing reviews, I will place the following:

‘A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.’ W. Shakespeare.

Do I have plans to publish another book, maybe this year? Well, I might – at some indeterminate date between now and my final gasp – but I don’t have plans. Anything’s possible.

I do plan on finishing this jumper I started knitting on Christmas Day – though I’m a bit concerned at the moment about the size. Did I separate off the sleeves from the body too soon? I was aiming for the same number of stitches as the Christmas one I did for my daughter (it’s the same yarn) but stopped when the sleeves hit sixty, when the front and back for some reason were only at 112, although on the other one it was 120. I can’t really tell by looking, because of it being on circular needles, and that also makes it a pain to try on – and I’ve lost my spare circular needle, which is what I used last time (front on one and back on the other). Bigger better than smaller, surely?  Should I undo what I did yesterday, to be safe? Yesterday I undid two squares’ worth of weather-blanket backing that I’d done the day before, because I wasn’t happy with the way it was working out.

I’m thinking now about Penelope, at the end of ‘The Odyssey’, weaving by day, and in the night unravelling what she’d done the day before, waiting for her husband, Odysseus, to return from the Trojan War (spoiler alert: it took ten years, on top of another ten years for the duration of the war). The process matters more than the outcome, the journey is more significant than the destination (evidently so in Odysseus’s case, I’m not aware of any stories about what happened after he and P were reunited). The process of unravelling is a bit frustrating, and as it’s knitting, picking up the stitches is a lot more of a pain than the crochet equivalent, but as long as there is no deadline, it’s surely preferable to a finished garment that’s too small? (Or maybe not, given that I’ll probably never wear it?)

Incidentally, that last sentence was just highlighted by Word, presumably because it thought it was a double negative – not so clever, eh?

This isn’t what I was going to write about. No resolutions, no plans, no expectations – not that I was intending to write about any of those – on the contrary.

Gazing out of the window, I watch the slow procession of clouds drifting across the gap between the end terraced house across the road and the pub on the corner. A woman in black leggings, a lime green top and head phones runs past my line of sight. Will I be like the running woman or like the clouds this year? What do you think?

Cloudy’, Simon and Garfunkel

Sat down at the PC to start writing and remembered a) the mouse isn’t working and b) the top tool bar on word keeps appearing and disappearing and I can’t work out how to fix it. Weell… actually, after a few more minutes of trying the View tab and other things, I Googled it and found out that if I right click on the home tab it gives me a drop-down including ‘Minimize the ribbon’ which was ticked, so I unticked it and that worked. The first suggestion: press Ctrl F1, was stymied by the fact that I can’t see ‘F1’ on my keyboard. Don’t know how it got ticked in the first place, but I suspect it happened when I was thrashing around trying to get the mouse to work.

I suspect the mouse just needs a new battery, but spare batteries are downstairs and the mouse is upstairs, and by the time I got downstairs I’d forgotten I needed to get them. If I remember, I could take the mouse down when I go and do it then, but that would rely on me remembering to take it, remembering what I’d taken it for, then remembering to bring it back up again. For now, I’m getting more practised at using the touch pad.

Today, I feel the way this poinsettia looks. I used to buy a poinsettia every year, and this is how they always ended up looking. I think it’s down to over-watering – but you only have to do it once and there’s no getting back from the slippery slope. I’m always a bit erratic with my watering regime, I guess it’s to do with short term memory and lack of awareness. Some things die from lack of water, which is recoverable-from if you notice in time, but there’s no way back from over-watering.

I can tell you exactly how long I’ve had this one, because I bought it the day we went into Tier 3, the Thursday before Christmas. I know, because it was the day I took my cards to the post office and checked the local shops for a small turkey joint, then bought a little Christmas tree and this poinsettia on the way home. Then my family persuaded me to go to them for Christmas anyway, by promising to come and get me and bring me back, then two days later we went in Tier 4 and the plan changed again (but you already know that story).

In other words, this poor plant has been in my care for less than a fortnight, and this is what I’ve done to it.

However, that’s not why I’m feeling droopy, as though I’m rotting from my roots. It’s just that I woke up that way, as often happens. Maybe it’s because I’m always rotting from my roots, and I’m not sure whether there’s any way back from that. Well, nothing permanent, as far as I can tell, but at least I’m not actually dead yet.