My Computer on Holidays
An idyllic location for a holiday © A. Harrison
Some time before Christmas my computer was on the blink. Literally. Complete with colourful diagonal lines or, when it wanted to spice things up, colourful boxes.
I thought the graphics card looked guilty, but replacing it was a bit beyond me at that point. I had a trip coming up, with the chaos of Christmas following on its heels; I had neither the time nor the emotional energy. I popped the computer to one side, in a vain attempt to declutter my desk as I convince myself theplace it not chaotic but instead a studiolo in the style of the Italian Renaissance. Luckily, I use the computer as a spare screen, an extension to my main computer. (A bigger one. A better one.) The thing was already giving my trouble, remaining ridiculously slow despite what I did to declutter the memory and the startup applications and any other suggestion which came my way. Even as a spare screen it was proving tiresome: extending the screen from my main computer had become more and more difficult. My main computer would readily share screens, yet despite being linked the option to extend the screen appeared about one attempt in twenty.
Last week, finally tired of not having a second screen, I swallowed my pride and decided to take the computer to a local service place to replace the card for me (and maybe speed the thing up in the process).
For whatever reason I decided to turn it on before heading off. And the thing worked perfectly. The same cables, the same connections.
Had it just needed a break and now, refreshed, was ready to face a new year? Intriguingly, it started with a new attitude as well, the backdrop now being yellow. And I mean really yellow, a colour which makes Van Gogh digoxin toxicity fade into insignificance.
Abolishing the yellow to the abyss took some 20 minutes to fix (for the thing remained ridiculously slow). Then, miracle of miracles, I noticed a small symbol in the corner indicating it had automatically connected to my other computer. (This had never happened before; I always had to manually click the connection boxes despite a tick beside them.) Not only that, the extension option now displayed on my main computer and voila, it worked straight away.
Most importantly, the two computers keep connecting – every time I turn them on, without suddenly disconnecting halfway through whatever I’m doing.
If only the start up screen wasn’t so yellow. I thought I fixed it, but no, I have to redo the settings each time. The speakers stopped working, but that issue I managed to resolve without causing a flow-on failure in another system. For the time being I’m content to tolerate the nauseating colour (which disappears when I extend my screen) in case the thing takes umbrage and refuses to talk to the other computer once more. I’ll just wait for its next holiday.
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An elderly matriarch walks through walks through her kitchen garden in the Tuscan hills, carrying her sketch book. The morning mists swirls around her, but soon they will fade and it will be time for the Spring Offering.
The mist muffled the day. It lay over the light, holding captive the cold air of dawn, until under the warmth of a late morning it would become nothing but a chill memory. Spring was still a few weeks away, and for a while longer winter would hold the hills captive. The valley below her was a world of grey. A tangible, moist grey, which flowed and ebbed with the centuries. It came with its own remembrances, damp with clinging. Of journeys to places where there was no winter, of the magic of coming home. Of lying warm abed with her beloved whilst the bells called. Of being young.
In another time, in a Venetian palazzo, a lord fumes on learning a priceless statuette, of an Etruscan goddess, has been stolen. He knows her worth, but remains ignorant of both her history and the power of her beauty over others.
Waves of cold anger flooded the room, spilling into halls where servants hid in the shadows, pretending not to hear. The wrath spiralled down the marble staircase and into the spacious receiving hall, made a few twirls under the candelabra then past the imposing tapestries hanging from the walls. It pushed through the heavy wooden doors and onto the chaos of the street outside. There it searched for a horse and rider who had fled through the night and continued now by day, splattered by the foam of exhaustion.
As the mists of the morning fade, the two times and places overlap, and the goddess returns to the light of the world.
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