Year: 2009

On Saturday I set off on the train to do a poetry reading in the Lakes. I was staying with Jennifer and Martin Copley. I’d met Jennifer briefly before, and read her Arrowhead book, but I had no idea that what was going to happen could be so . . . well – it all seemed extraordinary to me.

 

It was a very nice train journey in all sorts of ways. These journeys are always odd for me because I spend much of them memorising poems (not all of them by me). But you meet interesting people or overhear conversations that haunt you afterwards. This time one of the people I will remember was Francis, who had been a missionary in Angola. What he saw there traumatised him so much that he went (in his own words) ‘into solitude’ for twenty years. But he was one of a family of 12, and he was meeting three of his siblings for the first time in two decades. His solitude up to then had not even extended to talking to family. He said he had almost not travelled at all: he was fearful of meeting the sister he had always been close to, because twenty years ago he had shut her out. Even at the station before the one where he got off, he said – ‘I could still turn back.’ But he didn’t turn back. He got off the train in his straw hat with his shopping trolley of luggage. He seemed ineffably cheerful to the train travellers, me included. Sometimes cheerfulness seems to grow on top of sadness, like brilliant flowers on top of a dung heap.

Then Jennifer picked me up and took me to her house, which is a dream house, a glorious glorious house. It is quite beautiful in and of itself, but also because it is full of beautiful things, many of them sculpted heads created by Martin, her husband. It is the sort of house that belongs in a book. You could stay there for a year just wandering round picking up little objects and curiosities. Or watching the light falling across the floors or filtering through the windows. Even Ruby, the little dog, seemed like a magical dog out of a book.

Before the reading, which was at Water Yeat village hall, near Coniston, Jennifer took me for a meal with some members of the committee. That sounds a little like a meeting of the People’s Commissariat, but no, no, it was wonderfully not like that. Again, we arrived – after a sequence of beautiful deep green twisty lanes at another beautiful and ancient house, with stone flagged floors. We were to have eaten in the garden, but great fat drops of rain began to announce their inevitability, so we repaired to the dining room where an amazing meal appeared. It was a kedgeree with a whole quail’s egg in its shell on the top of each portion, and beautiful salad with walnuts, and then a huge bowl of strawberries with cream for dunking, and then a plate of cheeses… Oh a fabulous meal!

And then off again in the summer evening, down more poetry lanes, to Water Yeat village hall, with its little tables, each adorned with a posy of flowers, and quietly merry people chatting. What a lovely atmosphere there was – what a privilege to be invited to read there. There were floor spots where each poet read just a very few texts – and each poem was delivered as if cherished. The quality of listening was second to none, and although this was a real old-fashioned village hall that FELT like a village hall, the acoustic was very good indeed. And there was serious writing and there was mirth. And in the middle there was an amazing performance on a trumpet from a beautiful young woman called Kim Moore who also writes poetry! People are astonishingly gifted.

It was a lovely atmosphere, a very special kind of event. If I lived near enough I would go to each and every one of their readings: there are about five a year . .

fair but fleet
the pleasure sweet
when metres meet
at Water Yeat
at Water Yeat

So here we are. Mid-Summer. If you dodge between the raindrops, it’s pleasant. Most days it’s not too hot to sit in the conservatory, which is where I do a lot of reading and sorting out of poems in my head (not my poems, other people’s). We have even got new basketty chairs…

 

Yesterday I got out though and went to hear four of ‘my’ poets reading in WordPower in Edinburgh at lunchtime: Matt Merritt, James W Wood, Andy Philip, Rob A Mackenzie (the importance of an initial!). And to my great delight I met Eddie Gibbons (watch out for his next book – not long now).

Edinburgh was buzzing with talk of the Kevin Cadwallender wedding (isn’t it a superb phrase? – the Kevin Cadwallender Wedding? It’s a poem in itself.)  Colin Will was at the reading in his full highland attire, ready to officiate wedding-wise: he looked wonderful.

It was sunny. Then it was raining. Then it was sunny and raining at the same time. Then it was hot. Then it was cool. Then it was hotncoldwarmnwetsummerainy. Splish.

The reading was great. The air was electric, the books (real PAPER) cherished us on all sides, the new Tom Leonard was on sale, the boys had brought their hardback books, their pamphlets, their new poems. They shared their work magnificently.

I don’t go out much: can’t do that and the paperwork at the same time. But this is an unusual week. Yesterday there was Edinburgh. On Wednesday, I’m going to the Michael Marks Award thingy in the British Library (HappenStance being one of four short-listed presses). Then next Saturday I’m going to be poet myself at the Poem and a Pie event in Water Yeat Village Hall. I’ve bought a new bra (necessary prop, hope it fits).

Meanwhile, still pulling together Cliff Ashby’s Sampler (looking really good), Mark Halliday‘s first draft and then back to Sally Festing. Then the remarkable Rose Cook. And Alison Brackenbury and Clare Best next on the menu. Wish I could work faster… No I don’t. The pace is right. It’ll happen.

I have acquired a new stacking thing for papers on my desk. One of those racks with three layers. I thought it would be really useful to me. I intend to keep the letters I’m about to reply to (but don’t) on the top, then the work in progress in the middle, and the bits and pieces I don’t want to lose but am not actually using on the bottom. So the thing was purchased yesterday, assembled and put on The Desk. Papers of various kinds were neatly put on it, just where I could put my hand on them. As well as two or three mazines that came last week. Excellent.

 

Until this morning. Where is Smiths Knoll, number 44? I can ‘see’ it clear as day. But I can’t see it. And I was going to burble on a bit about how much I enjoyed it, because I did. I read it on Friday morning, quietly, all by myself while trying to collect my thoughts. It opens with a magnificently furious sonnet by John Whitworth – a marvellous tour de force of a poem. And then the next piece (which I can’t recall) is brilliant too — yes a Judy Brown, I think, which ends ‘Baby, I was boiled once. We all were.’

The truth is (how hard it is to confess) that I don’t always read poetry magazines carefully. Occasionally I don’t read them at all (Smiths Knoll is nearly always an exception), even though I pick them up and admire their covers. I hear the background blurb from the TV campaign saying — what is it? Let more poetry into your life, and a little voice in my head screams – No, no, not more, not more. This is a shameful confession of course. I love poetry. I just don’t love all poetry.

The new review scheme for Sphinx has started to roll into action. This means pamphlets are going out to three reviewers, instead of one. I do have some trepidation about it. On the positive side, it will allow three perspectives on a publication, which theoretically can present a balance of responses.

On the downside, if the publication is not very strong and all three reviewers say so, it will feel very crushing for the poet. I know what that feels like, to my cost. You think you won’t get emotional about it, but you do. It’s like listening to someone criticising your children: you’re the only person who’s allowed to do that with impunity.

It occurs to me that what is important in poetry, as in any other enterprise, is doing your best. Not Being The Best. At the same time reviewers have to do their best to express a reaction to that work: it’s an approximation, an honest endeavour. The Magma blog has had a fascinating discussion thread running on the topic of reviewing. Worth a look.

The HappenStance shop has a new free download. It’s a brief set of poems by Bobbie Coelho about her experience of Parkinson’s Disease. It doesn’t pretend to be a highly literary publication. It won’t be going out for review: that’s not what it’s for. However, it is a true and heart-felt reflection of her experience. We hope that people who read it with interest and pleasure, might donate to the Parkinson’s Disease Society. Poetry can belong to everybody.

Tim Love sent me a link to a Poets&Writers article by Sandra Beasley – more about the online debate. Fascinating.

Oh dear. I like the online thing. I really do. However, I love paper. My brain formed its familiar circuits in decades before this onlinery happened. I don’t feel the same about reading on-screen: I flit quickly, less concentration, less connection between word and sound (unless there’s a sound file with the poem, which I like).

Twitter drives me nuts. Some of my Twit friends tweet so much I have to stop following them. Twitter is for flitters, one of which I am, when online.

Not that I don’t respect this stuff. I do. I just become part of a huge endlessly circling crowd of gnats, compelled by instinct to do my bit of tweeting, bleating, meeting and competing.

But as a headache person, increasingly I need to get away from the screen. Go somewhere with natural daylight and bird-song. Touch the paper I’m reading from. Calm down.

Because somehow the online world agitates me. It’s the sense of infinite connections, infinite clever moves I’m not clever enough to make, that sense of the world spinning ever faster and my head spinning with it. Among the bloggerati, I am comforted by a Tony Frazer (Shearsman) entry:

I did get some work done today, if not quite enough to make feel better about the backlog. Ever get to the point where there’s so much to do you can’t do any of it? In that scenario today was half a success. Work also allows me (& I imagine most others) to hide from all the other crap that’s floating around, although I can recognise that hiding isn’t necessarily the answer to anything. I did stop now and again to wave my arms about…

Oho, yes. My personal panic is exacerbated by staring at a screen, where everybody in the world (and we are talking global here) seems to have more of a hold on reality than I do. Their RSS feeds are feeding whatever needs to be fed, their blogs are cuter, their insights astuter.

So I slink back to my own territory: one word at a time. Here’s where Sally Festing’s poems, Cliff Ashby’s slow reflections nourish me.  Twenty minutes considering a comma. The dust quietly descending on my stacks of books…

The first glorious weekend of summer! Unfortunately the weather goes to the heads of some people. Our neighbours insisted on sharing the insistent heavy-bass beat of their summer-weather music all day yesterday from midday to ten pm. Poets, migraine sufferers and naturally quiet people are reduced to blobs of misery in these circumstances.  I have to keep reminding myself that curses are like boomerangs: when well-thrown…

Work proceeds on the unending submissions box. A Sampler of Cliff Ashby’s (to be in time for his ninetieth birthday) is in hand, and Sally Festing’s poems are in little piles, many of them with several versions. A large college task finished on Friday. With the help of Sumatriptan, things should start to move more quickly now, so far as HappenStance is concerned.

On the good side, Ann Drysdale’s new book, Discussing Wittgenstein, arrived. I wrote a Forward for this, but I had forgotten doing it. Sometimes when you read your own writing some months after you’ve forgotten it, you feel slightly embarrassed by what you said, or didn’t say. In this case, I was so pleased that I had actually said exactly what I meant about this book.

Wittgenstein is a mainly prose account of the last months of Ann’s husband’s life. It is a sequel to Three-three, two-two, five-six, at the end of which she and Philip had finally and miraculously made it home from hospital. Their struggle with hospital systems, illness and the change to their own relationship was the central matter of that book. The short prose chapters were interspersed with poems. The experience was often horrible, but the comic muse was present, even in adversity.

And that continues to be the case in this volume. I can imagine there are people who couldn’t read it. It could be too close to the bone for someone actually in this situation of grappling with a terminal condition or a partner who has one. However, for anyone mercifully more distant from that, it is such a generous — such a human invitation to share that experience. It is compelling, instantly readable, generous, witty, humane, funny, moving — the full gamut of emotions. And it is one of the great love stories of our time, I think.

The mixture of poetry and prose is something I’ve never seen done like this — or done half so well. I think it is because some of the feelings are so strong that they demand poetic expression. I’ll share ‘Sleeping Together’ because it is so good. Ann Dryden is a true poet, a fascinating writer — not like anybody else. I share her irritation with our age’s hyped attitude to sex, I adore the way she disposes of grand sexual climax as “the spurt of jism / That signals ‘tools down’ for the jobbing lover’, and I think the end of the poem — the sestet, in effect — is marvellous and unique. “Perilous proximity” — what a way to sum up how it is, how it really is! What oft (but not oft enough) was thought, but ne’re so well expressed:

Sleeping Together

‘To sleep with’ has become a euphemism
For fucking, humping, shagging, or whatever
Leads to orgasm, to the spurt of jism
That signals ‘tools down’ for the jobbing lover.
Sleeping with someone is an act of love —
Another phrase that raises nudge and wink
When it is innocently spoken of —
Though not as erotic as the dullards think.
Sleeping is quiet time for private study;
A heaven-given opportunity
Of cherishing another human body
In all its perilous proximity,
Its promontories and its recesses,
The busy music of its processes.

I have been about to blog about two new poetry books for some time. They are Andy Philip’s The Ambulance Box and Rob Mackenzie’s The Opposite of Cabbage. They have been all over the place with me. Downstairs on the table beside the settee where I read stuff. In the conservatory, where I read stuff. Beside my bed, where I mean to read stuff but usually fall asleep first. In my work bag. In my overnight bag. And in fact, I have read both with great pleasure. With greater pleasure even than usual, since both poets were HappenStance poets first. Andy was the very first HappenStance pamphlet ever! He has been out of print for years now and his little pamphlet, with the picture of the man with a dove on his head, must be a collector’s item, I think.

 

You can find the poem ”Man with a Dove on his Head’ in Andy’s Salt collection, The Ambulance Box. I still think it is outstanding. Andy’s not afraid of strong feeling. The emotive charge is electric. You feel it from the dedication to Aidan Michael Philip (the poet’s son who was born and died on the same day) right through to the beautiful love poem ‘In Praise of Dust’. It is a book which includes poems in both Scots and English. The intermingling feels very natural to me, very elegant. ‘Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes’ – the old story told in Scots – is particularly moving:

And when, suddenly,
the god stopped her and said thae words wi pain
clear in his vyce: He’s turnt hissel aroun — 
she didnae unnerstaun and quait-like said: Wha?

But the whole book is such a lovely thing to hold and read. In an age where we constantly feel books are about to disappear — especially poetry volumes — what a marvellous thing to have a first full collection in hardback! Both these books — Andy’s and Rob’s — are beautiful hardbacks, with loose paper jackets. The end papers are a rich dark green. The print is big enough to read properly. There’s generous space about the poem on the page. Not too many poems in each volume.

Rob has even included a sestina that I like (I am deeply biassed against this form). ‘A Creative Writing Tutor Addresses his Star Pupil’ is clever and very funny.

I have often thought Rob is one of those poets who slips in and out of different voices with such guile that his inner truth (whatever that may be) is hard to be sure of. He likes to play. He reminds me of a boy on the way to school who stops to kick a stone around or to take an exceptionally good look at a snail. But here somehow the collection as a whole does come together: you find yourself developing a secure sense of his own precise ‘voice’, even when that voice is talking about the difficulty of being sure about anything. Such an interesting collection, well-balanced, varied, ending so well. Even when writing lightly, Rob doesn’t write lightly:

And yes,
I am equally puzzling to myself, equally
apparent in my sky blue boots, tilting now to
this flower, now this one, this one, that one.

But there is a problem. Salt Publishing, which has produced these lovely books, is in trouble. This is significant for everyone who reads and loves poetry. No publishing imprint has worked harder than Salt has in the last few years to make a go of things, to build the readership, to make poetry sales work. They deserve support, they need support. At the moment the ‘just one book’ campaign asks as many people as possible to buy something from them. What better books could you buy (if you haven’t already got them) than The Ambulance Box and The Opposite of Cabbage?

It looks as though poetry is not recession-proof. But hey — look how bloody determined it is! Rob himself has a great post on the Salt situation, followed by interesting discussion.

I forgot to mention the fact that HappenStance was shortlisted for the Michael Marks pamphlet publishers award. It is nice that this has happened, though small compensation for the bigger problems with book publishing at Salt…

Already, email (and one postal) submissions have started to arrive as a result of this. Now why would you send a submission to a publisher without checking out their website and their submission requirements first? I can only say that people do this. They do it all the time.

Interestingly, the Michael Marks summary mentions that I specialise in first collections, with an emphasis on Scottish writers or writers with Scottish connections. I guess I must have written this myself because I wanted it to be true.  I do retain an intense interest in Scottish writers, and I publish at least one pamphlet each year by an author living in Scotland.

However, most of my writers are actually not Scottish, or connected with Scotland in any way. I look for what I think is good poetry, of a type I personally like. I always hope that some of this will also be being written in the country in which I live – Scotland.

I also forgot to tie up the computer story. I did get the MacBook and it did talk to my Imac, via a Firewire cable. All the wandering minstrels (I mean files) were recovered. I was assisted by a wonderful ‘support agent’ called Vigneshwaran, who combined charm with intense patience. It took about two hours to carry the process through. He told me what to do. I did it. After that, of course, it took much much longer to do all the updates, re-instal files etc. I lost (in HappenStance work terms) just over two weeks. But worse things happen at sea. I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the….

Last night I was listening to Andrew Motion on the radio, talking about the National Poetry Archive. How amazing, that recording by Tennyson! I knew Browning had been captured, but not Tennyson.

 

But what about Ruth Pitter? According to the Don King biography, there are recordings of her reading her own work in the US Library of Congress. I do hope so. Because the biography also makes reference to recordings made by Ruth’s nephew, Mark Pitter and given to the British Library in the seventies. I almost cried out with horror when I read that these recordings had “as of now … not been located”.  Where are they?

Thankfully, she did a number of radio broadcasts, and these are archived by the BBC, so her voice is still around somewhere, and happily the National Poetry Archive has a bit of her. Thank you Andrew Motion! She wasn’t there last time I looked, but that may have been a good while ago now. And here she is, talking to John Wain, no less, and the conversation ends with her reading the superb lyric, ‘If you came’. I have known this poem all my life, it seems. It was through my mother that I first met Pitter and it was through Pitter that I first learned one of the electrical truths about poetry.

I was at school, probably about sixteen or seventeen. Our school, Wilmslow County Grammar School for Girls, was separated by a matter of three miles or so from Wilmslow County Grammar School for Boys. They separated the two sexes the year I started there. A year or so after I left, they put them back together again.

For us, there were no male distractions during class, although our male teachers acquired a stature (either of potency or ridiculousness) they might not otherwise have had. Mr Trueblood, for example, the biology teacher who was persuaded that the word menstruation derived from the Latin ‘mensa’, a month. Those of us also studying A-level Latin knew this was not true. And there was The Penguin, the lackadaisical Mr Haslam, who indeed resembled that creature in his slouching progress down school corridors in an academic gown that had seen better days. Much better. Walk on the left girls, not on the right!

But back to Pitter. Why, I cannot recall, but a group of us were invited to join a group of boys at The Other School, and it was some kind of literary event. We had to take with us a poem or two to read aloud. I dimly recall sitting in a kind of circle, and a male teacher introduced us to each other. Such a sense of disappointment: the boys were so much less than expectation had suggested (I had no brothers, only a sister. Even our dog was female).

Then we had to read a poem out loud, and I read Pitter’s ‘If You Came’.

I was aware when reading it of a kind of electric silence, and the space that opened out in the room after the end of the poem — the huge after-poem space. Then the teacher (this cannot be literally true so the memory must be connected with the way he spoke) sprang across the room to me and said, ‘Did you write that?‘ I felt the attraction.  I possessed magical power.

‘No. It is by Ruth Pitter,’ I said. Immediately I was much less interesting than before, restored to ordinary mortality. But I remembered the moment and what words can do. I remembered that.

I didn’t know back then that Ruth Pitter was alive. I thought all poets were dead. The ones we studied at school were both male and dead. Ah well. She is dead now, but at least a bit of her voice is there, not to mention her poems.

As I write, an unusual thing has just happened. A squirrel (we have one in the garden sometimes, but not often – they don’t live in the trees around us) arrived on the bedroom window sill, which is nearer the roof than the ground.

Matt alerted me and I shot into the bedroom from my study. The squirrel was poised on the edge of the sill, his eyes starting slightly with (I imagine) some degree of alarm, and he was making a funny chirring noise – loud. If I hadn’t seen him, I would have thought it was a bird’s sound, and it was evidently in response to the starlings (they are called stukkies here) who were sitting on top of the street lamp shouting at him. Other birds were also signalling alarm. Some fierce communication going on, a verbal battle.

After a little while, the squirrel shot off up the side of the house, his clawed feet easily leading him across the harling. I have seen one go up the side of the house once before — a couple of years ago. I wonder what he was after? I think the starlings are nesting in the roof, but I also thought all their young were hatched. Do squirrels attack young birds? Or is the the birds who endanger the squirrel?

Oh botheration: it is the squirrel who is the Beast apparently. And the nests are not at all well-hidden. I know where all of them are…

As Ruth Pitter said:

The place is hidden apart
Like the nest of a bird:|
And I will not show you my heart
By a look, by a word.

The premise is that you believe what the man on the phone promises, even though you know that the printed information says something different. So no — the promised PowerBook didn’t arrive yesterday, although the man on the phone said it would. The printed confirmation stated the 15th, and this is almost certainly closer to being accurate. The shipping email said it had been sent on the 5th, and one does wonder how long it takes to get a box to Scotland from Ireland…  However, it’s not here and the payment has not been deducted from my bank account, although I do have a receipt.

 

Never mind. In the meantime I managed to lock myself out of all the accounts on my pc for complicated reasons which I will spare you. I blame the Radio 4 programme Hacked to Pieces, which was unnerving and caused me to password-protect all folders, as well as change all my passwords.

Ah well. Nothing gold can stay. HappenStance new publications (and even the flyers) remain in a state of arrested development, but other processes continue. Publications have been dutifully posted out. The submissions box is being worked gradually through.

And I finally finished reading Don King’s Hunting the Unicorn, a critical biography of Ruth Pitter. For any Pitterophile (and I am one) it is a marvellous source of information and anecdote — all sorts of things in it that you won’t have read anywhere else before. It is my privilege to review it for The Dark Horse, Gerry Cambridge’s superb Scottish-American poetry magazine.

King quotes from a number of Pitter’s essays and radio broadcasts.  Here is a lovely piece from a radio broadcast titled Glory Is Real. Pitter had a vivid sense of the numinous in life, from her very early childhood onwards:

“I had dreams of glory. The whole meaning of life was, and is, glory: an incomprehensible, but inevitable, supreme good. I had glimpses of it everywhere.”

But one of the wonderful things about Ruth Pitter was (and is) her ability to root the spiritual in the everyday. She must be one of the very few mystics with a sense of humour. She goes on to describe the glory not of the nature but of their uncle’s new car:

“This was magic. There could be no other name for it . . . . Glory was real. There was its angelic messenger, the motor-car. Hushed and transfigured, we three children climbed slowly into the heavenly chariot, sat down, already half etherealized, on the red leather, and were whirled away in a trance of wonder and delight.”

Isn’t that lovely? The prelapsarian automobile . . . .

The photograph, reproduced in its rather woeful state, without permission, shows my ‘other half’, Matt McGregor, in his youth – working on a car, when a ‘car’ was something more than the first syllable of ‘carbon footprint’.

 

 

After my diatribe on upcoming publications, another flyer arrives.

This time it’s up-and-coming poets.

It is, of course, not like me to resort to low sexual innuendo, but in sexual terms, the latter description is almost an oxymoron. Or at the very least an image of something which would not … last … long.

Online Roget has up-and-coming meaning ‘showing great promise’. I don’t like it.

It is all part of today’s poetry publicity machine, driven to jargon and cliché in such a way as to make the down-and-going Muse turn in her grave. Grrr.

p.s. Read your poetry and rip it up. What an interesting idea!

You always know it’s going to happen again sooner or later. I suppose for me it was later, since this hasn’t happened for years. But I knew it would recur. I knew.

 

See, I have lost vital documents before. I have had computers crash. I’ve also been pretty lucky about seeing it coming or getting warning signs.

Twas Friday. The sun was shining. My list of 22 things to do was down to 15, two of which included tidying up a Sampler for Cliff Ashby (when you are 90 such things should not be delayed) (oh … I am not 90, Cliff is) and a wee slip of an unofficial publication for Bobbie Coelho (more about that later). Those were the small tasks, and then I was going to start on the new pamphlets for Sally Festing and Mark Halliday, to be closely followed by Tommy McKean’s Conversation with Ruth Pitter, and poetry pamphlets by Rose Cook and Alison Brackenbury. Not to mention the submissions box for January because several very good people still haven’t had responses from me.

Ah, it all sounds so simple. And so it should have been. I was calm. I had swiftly and unerringly moved onto the part-time teaching timetable which means I get paid less but get more time – so no teaching on Fridays.

But before I started the HappenStance stuff, I went to print a pdf (an email attachment). It wouldn’t print. This is my NEW printer. Bugger! This has happened before, but not with this printer. Somehow my computer paused the print job. This shouldn’t be a problem in itself. It should be very simple to un-pause it. However, on my Mac, for reasons which have never been plain, I can’t get into a System Preferences pane, which normal Mac users can see. The System Preferences Pane tells you what’s going on with the printer (among other things).

So I fiddled with a few things, turned things off and on. No joy.

When I bought my Imac I took out the three-year protection plan which was on special offer and very cheap. It runs out in 37 days. So I decided wotthehell, as archy would have said, I would phone them and see if I could sort out this System Preferences thing. (This is quite a long story, by the way – too long for a blog really. How long have you got?)

I phoned. The Mac people are terribly nice. It is practically worth the protection plan money just to get to talk to them. However, that is by the by. While I was talking the printer suddenly creaked into action and printed the offending document. Typical. I realised that for some reason it was coming through as a very large file (even though just one page long) and this was what had caused the problem. However, I thought I’d ask about the System Preferences anyway. First mistake.

The charming person I spoke to (called Scott) took me through all sorts of clever ways of trying to find where my System Preferences had gone. It’s an education doing this kind of thing. It really is. However, we didn’t find them. He went to ask a Senior Technician who suggested something else, but the System Preferences preferred to remain unfound.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Scott. ‘Have you got the disks that came with your Imac handy?’

‘I do,’ I said proudly.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘We can do an archive install. That will make sure your System Preferences are where they ought to be without disrupting any of your current files.’

He showed me how to do it. Select options, choose ‘Archive instal’ which doesn’t erase the hard drive.

Then we ceased talking because the installation takes about an hour and a half, during which time I abandoned HappenStance and went to do SQA work.

All went well. First disk one. Then, when instructed by the machine itself, disk 2. Soon a message came up ‘Finishing Installation’… ‘one minute to go’. But an hour later there was also ‘one minute to go’. Half an hour after that there was still ‘one minute to go’.

So I phoned them. ‘Ah,’ said my next kindly Mac person. ‘The archive installation has failed. What you’ll need to do is start it all again.’

That was when I first had the Uneasy Feeling. ‘What will happen,’ I ventured nervously, ‘if it doesn’t work the second time around?’

‘It should work,’ he said (I don’t know what he was called). ‘It works 90% of the time.’

How do you feel about percentages? When someone says 90% of the time to me, I hear ‘10% of the time it doesn’t work.’

‘So what do I do if it doesn’t work?’ I asked.

‘You’ll need to do a full installation,’ he said.

‘You mean erase the hard drive and install?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Wait a minute,’ I said, thinking fast. ‘Can I back up the files I was working on when I rang you before I do that?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You can wire it up to another machine and copy from one to the other. It’s quite easy. Have you got another Mac?’

‘Have I got another Mac?’

‘Yes. Have you got another computer on your network?’

‘I haven’t got a network,’ I squeaked. ‘I have an external hard drive. And another computer. But it’s a pc, not a Mac.’

‘It has to be a Mac,’ he said. ‘Alternatively you could get a Mac engineer to get the files off your computer though it could cost several hundred pounds.’

‘Ah,’ I said. There was a pause.

I couldn’t help saying, ‘It would have been good idea, on balance, if the last adviser had warned me about this possibility, wouldn’t it? It wouldn’t have taken me long to back up before we started all this. The last time I did it was three weeks ago.’ (Thank God, I was thinking. At least I had done it then. At least I might only have to replicate three weeks’ worth of work.)

But I do quite a lot of work in three weeks. I couldn’t quite remember how many documents that would be… And I had some emails that needed replies, and I hadn’t backed up my email address book either.

‘The second installation should work,’ he said. But I knew he sounded Less Sure.

‘I’ll try it,’ I said. ‘But if it doesn’t work, I’m going to be phoning you again. For Counselling, right?’

‘Okay,’ he said cheerfully. He knew, you see, that I wouldn’t get him next time round. There are 38 of them. I know this because Scott (the first one) told me that he wasn’t busy at all, there were 38 of them waiting for calls to come in because for some reason it was terribly quiet at the moment…

Needless to say it did not work. I tried it three times. You can hear the point at which the installation fails because the second disk tries to do something; its engines whirr into action and then just die.

Meanwhile, I was on my other (old) desktop. On which, I might point out, I am currently writing this blog. I was looking up the price of Macbooks. I’ve been going to get a laptop for ages, because I really need one when I’m doing SQA work away from home. I was going to get a Windows laptop, but it suddenly came to me that if it was a Mac laptop (much dearer), I could use it to do the backing up thing. Also I could do the backing up thing regularly. Belt and braces.

I put the bits and pieces I would need (white Macbook on offer) into my Apple basket and then phoned the salesline to sort out the educational discount (thank you Adam Smith College employer). Apple have lovely sales people as well as lovely (if dangerous) protection plan advisers. This one was called Duncan. He had an Irish accent which could sell anything. He was just lovely. He even knew about Mac to Mac saving stuff, and the firewire I would need, and explained some other stuff.

‘Ok,’ I said. ‘I may get back to you tomorrow.’

Slept on it.

Next day, I checked with the protection plan people that if I bought the Macbook this whole bloody computers talking to each other really would work, even with my Imac in a state of impenetrability. Because discount or no discount, people, we are talking serious money here and HappenStance Press is only just afloat cash-wise. And Helena Nelson has just reduced her teaching salary by a laptop a month.

This time I got a chap with what I think was a Caribbean accent. At first I thought I might have difficulty understanding him well, but as we went along I got to like him. He explained the whole firewire thing and how it would work and why it should work. (He was quite careful on this aspect.)

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Just one last thing. What if when all this is done and I do the Full Installation and Erase Disk option – what if THAT doesn’t work?’

‘That will mean there is something wrong with your hard disk,’ he said.

‘Not the installation disks,’ I said, ‘you mean the hard disk drive of the Imac?’

‘Correct,’ he said.

‘In which case,’ I suggested, ‘you would have to do something about that because it would be your fault not mine because my computer is still inside extended warranty and protection plan?’

‘Correct,’ he said (but I could hear him grinning). ‘You have thirty-seven days to go.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’m buying the Macbook but I’m phoning back next week to be talked through the bit where the Macs talk to each other. Is that okay?’

‘Certainly, Madam,’ he said. At least I think he said ‘Madam’ at this point. He certainly made me feel important.

So that’s the state of play today, May 2, 2009.

I have spoken with Irish Duncan, ensured he got a sale before he downed tools for the day, and rejigged my list of things to do. It’s now Submissions Box, Ruth Pitter biography review, the SQA support pack notes and the Ambit reviews while I am waiting to get back onto the Imac, which is the only way I can type-set publications.

The next chapter in this story will be next Friday, when I hope the new machine will arrive and the scheme will be put to the test.

Blog entries should be short and sweet. You don’t need all this. I am sorry. It has made me feel better.