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

I spent a lot of time on Sunday downloading photos to my hard drive and deleting emails from my Gmail account, and got the drive down to 75% full, only to get up yesterday and find that, once again, Google was screaming at me that my storage was 99% full and I needed to buy more space.

When I logged onto my Google Drive it showed me the standard folders I always have: Accounts, Crafts, mp3 files, Meditation and Poetry , with no ‘loose’ files (I sorted all those out ages ago, and only save things into those folders). But when I clicked on the link to ‘list files in descending size order’ I was shocked to find screen after screen full of other files, including lots of photos which I knew for a fact I’d deleted the day before. I clicked on one, and in a panel on the right of the screen titled ‘details’ I found out it was in a folder called ‘Huawei  P20 Lite’ (which is the name of my phone) – which didn’t appear in the list of folders I could see.

What had happened (I surmised) was that it had noticed that there was some space available on my Google drive, and decided to fill it by backing up everything from my phone.

I then had a look at the space on my phone, and found that I’d used 57GB out of a total of 64GB, of which 25GB was photos. I had photos on there from when I got this phone – in August 2018, and all the ones I’d taken since – which is a rather a lot. So, I spent most of yesterday morning deleting (again) files from my Google drive, and also deleting the older ones from my phone.

Now, you might ask yourself – as I asked myself – what possible justification can there be for supplying 15GB of free cloud space to back up a device which has up to 64GB capacity? – but a moment’s thought shows there’s a perfectly rational explanation, centred round that word ‘Free’ – Google is quite happy to supply me with more cloud space to backup my data, at £16/year for another 85GB. Now, admittedly that’s not a huge expense, but bear in mind that I already have over four times as much unoccupied space as that on the 1 Terabyte hard drive which came with my PC.

Not only that, but as I type this, my server has been merrily chugging away backing up the data from  my phone onto my Google drive yet again, and has just informed me that my storage has now gone from 77% to 88% full, so that soon I won’t be able to send or receive emails, and I might like to consider buying some more…

I mention all this partly because it took up a lot of yesterday, but also because it seems like a good metaphor… to be continued.

I’ve had my current phone since 2018 – when I returned to Android after a two-year flirtation with iPhone – and in all that time it has never been backed up because it always tries to back it up to my old gmail account, and every so often sends me a message to tell me that the backup has failed because there is no space, and that it hasn’t been backed up for 700-and-something days. Last week I managed to change the settings so it will backup to my current account (which may ultimately prompt the necessity to start another gmail account), but I couldn’t find out how to change the photo backup, which still goes to the original gmail account and is still permanently full.

This week, in a fit of displacement from thinking about doing anything about the actual physical chaos in my life, I started trying to clear out my Google Drive space. As I said, I’ve made previous efforts: deleting all emails with attachments; deleting files which I put on Google drive to share access between devices; downloading and deleting some old photographs, and so on. (Incidentally, I have 707gb free of 918gb total on my hard drive, so it makes sense to stick my photos on there rather than pay to increase my 15gb Google drive). Also, I’d been kind of hoping that I might find those photos from 2012 that I mentioned the other week, but they’d obviously gone in a previous purge (still haven’t found my old-old laptop, by the way)  – there were just a handful of photos from pre-2015, so I put those all into a folder together on the hard drive a couple of weeks ago, and this week started methodically downloading all photos from 2015 onwards, copying them into a folder called ‘Photo backups’, deleting them from Google drive and then emptying the Google drive bin. I’ve been doing this a month at a time – sometimes having to do two downloads for a month because the download limit for one zip file is 500, which I have occasionally exceeded in a month.

I finished 2015, and was getting messages to say my Google Drive was now 70% full, which was very reassuring, until the next morning, when I logged on and found it was 99% again… to be continued

But I know they get snow in Texas, I’ve experienced it. Ex-Hubby and I lived in Dallas from March 1985 till May 1989, so we spent four winters there, during which time we twice saw snow lying on the ground for several days, which was about as much as we could expect to see in Bedford (and a lot more than I’ve seen in Southsea in six years).

The clearest in my memory was at the beginning of March 1989, the weekend before I was due to give birth, when the baby shower had to be cancelled because nobody wanted to risk driving – least of all me, who didn’t fancy risking walking either. I have a distinct memory of stepping gingerly over compacted and frozen snow ridges to get to my car, though goodness knows where I was going that was so urgent

I’m sure there must be photos somewhere – but I have been looking for them in the study and have now given up the will to live. I pulled out the albums from that time, and found the one from March 1989 which should have had some, but couldn’t find any with snow on, just lots of baby pictures. There didn’t seem to be an album covering December 1987, which would have been the other snowy occasion – there must have been one, but goodness knows where.

Once I’d got all the albums off the shelf and flicked through them, I couldn’t face putting them back. In my defence, getting to the shelf required me to lean over a pile of junk on the floor and hurt my back. I did manage to get to another shelf which was slightly easier to get at, but just dumped them on there without any attempt to put them in order, which of course will make it even harder to find the next time I want to. This is why my life is such a mess, and yes, I am my own worst enemy, and no, I never get any better.

I am feeling lost now, lost in the past and the chaos and detritus of my life, and my emotions, and an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. Which tells me I don’t want to do any more today. So I put my arms around my cat – who is sitting on the desk right in front of me – and bury my face in her fur. To my amazement, although she wriggles a little, she doesn’t try to get away. I do it again, gently, and she lets me stay for several seconds, then turns to look out of the window, and I let her go. I follow her gaze into a drizzly February day, and watch the steam curling out from a pipe just under the roof eaves of the pub across the road against the grey sky.

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…

It is similar in that way to this and the other blogs and journals I’ve written down the years. I’ve wondered casually whether what I’m writing is the basis for an autobiography – or at least, memoirs – but it would be a very scrappy one, because there are large and significant portions of my life – like living in Dallas, or when I was doing my PhD – when I wrote very little, and others, like now, when little happens but I write about it quite intensively. The same happened when I was travelling – there are places I went to which, when I went through my notes and blogs, I found I’d written hardly anything about at the time, but when I was writing the first draft, it was quite recent in time, so I managed to scrape something together, often using my photos as aides memoires, and picking up additional information from the internet. Towards the end (of both the travelling and the writing) there are places (such as Kristiansund, Oslo, Hamburg and Amsterdam) that I skimmed through with very little attention and interest, but these are mainly in the still-unpublished second half, The Long Way Back.

Interestingly (perhaps), since I’ve had the selected photos rotating on my desktop, I’ve noticed there are also very few from the last weeks included in the sequence – not because I didn’t take any then, but because I never bothered to go through them, select them, edit for size and add them to the folder. On the other hand, there’s a preponderance of Brussels, Paris, Brittany and San Sebastian, the first places on the itinerary.

January comes to an end today. I used to hate this time of year, but that was when I set a lot of store by Christmas, and found the new year always an anticlimax. Now I find that this can be quite a hopeful time – even though it usually has the worst weather of the year, at least the light is slowly coming back. A daffodil opened in my forecourt a couple of days ago, but was immediately so battered and droopy it hardly deserved a photo. I can confirm that this has been the coldest and gloomiest beginning in the four years I’ve been crocheting weather blankets.

Last week, I decided on impulse to go back to it, so all of these pictures of places I went have been flashing up, changing every minute, which is a terrible temptation just to sit and stare at the desktop without actually doing anything. Some of them I recognise – some instantly, as they’re well known tourist icons, others are more difficult and occasionally there’s one which could be anywhere (or any of several places, at least).

I don’t know why I just said that, except that it’s what I’ve been doing for the last few minutes.

Istanbul, Barcelona, Venice and then… not sure, red and blue boats in a rocky harbour – Sorrento, maybe? The out of the way fishing harbour that I ‘discovered’ in the pouring rain on the afternoon of my birthday – if so, it must have been taken when I returned on the following morning (Easter Sunday), because the sun is shining. But I’m not convinced – there are so many pictures of little boats with bare masts and furled sails, in picturesque harbours. Sometimes I can work it out on the basis of the weather, what time of year it seems to be – Brittany in February, San Sebastian and Provence in March, Italy in April, Croatia and then Istanbul and the Black Sea coast in May, then the long, long stretch over the heart of the continent in June, to the Baltic (Flensburg and Stockholm) and Atlantic (Norway, Hamburg, Amsterdam) in July.

I tried to speed up the rotation, but one minute is the minimum Microsoft will allow me for each image. I’m sure it used to be possible to set it at 30 seconds, but that was in an older version of Windows.

Just flicked back and caught sight of a wonderful wintery image of a sandy Breton beach at low tide, with a stranded boat, a gull just taking off in the foreground and the mist so thick in the air – I remembered how much it reminded me of Wales. I’ve never been back, never seen Brittany in summer, I’ll always have this memory of cold and mist and constant drizzle – to be fair, that also goes for many of the places I visited in Provence and Italy, in that relentlessly rainy April.  

I don’t know what I was going to write about today. Not that. But maybe that was safer than how I’ve been feeling.

Every day I struggle to find something decent to take pictures of – I committed myself at the start of the year to posting a photo on Facebook for every day of the year, but as I don’t go anywhere it has become a chore to find anything, especially as I can’t see anything on my phone when I’m outdoors, so have to keep pointing and clicking then half the time come back in and find I’ve completely missed the intended subject or chopped it in half. So I’m posting a lot of pictures of my cat, who can be relied on to be photogenic, and as far as the garden goes, sometimes I’m able to get close up to individual flowers before they give up and die (quite often they are weeds anyway) and no long shots of the garden to show how little interest it holds.

The hydrangea is the next thing which has flowers currently in bud, opening one floret at a time. I’ve also got another hydrangea which doesn’t do so well, the last two years it hasn’t flowered at all, and apparently gives up and dies around mid-July, though it has dragged itself back to life in late spring both years. The lavender has no flower buds at all that I can see – I pruned it last year to stop it getting over-straggly, I did it immediately after the flowers died, which I thought was what you’re supposed to do so it doesn’t affect the next year’s flowers, but that doesn’t seem to have worked. The sedums are in bud though, so I suppose I have those to look forward to. I think there used to be some day lilies in one of the beds, but can’t see any signs of flower buds yet, just a confused lot of leaves which I can’t identify. Last year I let the red valerian have its head – because it’s colourful, at least – and it has pretty much taken over everything, along with the weedy white cranes-bill geraniums which sprout up all over the ‘lawn’ (in between the buttercups) and pretty much everywhere else.

I have thought about having the ‘patio’ properly paved, but it’s quite interesting seeing the range of weeds that push up through the gravel. I forgot to mention the fennel, something else that appears everywhere. And the white snapdragons that I found (in the gravel) when I hacked back some of the valerian – I took some pictures, none were good enough to share, and they haven’t flowered since.