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It’s eerily quiet here just now. No sound at all from upstairs. When the war was on I could hear John Simpson commentating through the floorboards. It was like being in a hideout beneath the deserts of northern Iraq. Even my young downstairs neighbours, who would have vigorous sex that lasted precisely half an hour - not a minute more, not a minute less, at eleven on weeknights, 1am at weekends, have gone. There’s a for sale sign in the window.

It’s not that my neighbours are noisy. Far from it - I barely ever hear them - but the war did get the upstairs people excited, and I think perhaps they had surround sound installed so they could enjoy the full effect. But now, when everything is quiet - silent - you notice they are not there. No distant flushing of a toilet, or the curious sound of a pull-cord bathroom light that you only ever hear from above if you live in an upstairs flat or a loft conversion. And it’s nice. I feel like stretching out and just listening to the silence, and enjoying the soft hum of the still, gentle air all around me as it rests on my ears.

Instead, though, I put it to good use, lighting a scented candle, brewing fresh tea and sitting down to write. Just me and the iBook, which really does seem to have a character all of its own. It feels far more friendly than any other computer - more like a writing companion than a tool.

It’s almost a week since I did any serious work on my story, though, and my hero has been stuck on a narrow ledge high above Taipei for all that time. I have a duty to bring him down. Or push him off. Either way, he can’t stay there forever.

I upgraded my Linux this morning to the latest release. Not entirely successful. I was going Red Hat to Red Hat, so I assumed it would be a simple matter of saving my mail files and documents and sticking the disc in the drive. It worked in as much as I have a fully functioning system, but the mail program has been upgraded, too, and it has lost all of my messages since 6th March - incoming and outgoing. It also lost four items that arrived this morning and I never got to see. I’m hoping they were spam.

It’s the first time I’ve ever wished for spam, but I don’t want to lose messages from friends.

Now it needs to be tweaked to get it back the way I like it. To be honest, ‘the way I like it’ would be if it looked and worked like OS X, which is Unix at heart anyway. Can it really be so difficult to port it across, or to make Windows look and feel like Linux or OS X itself?

Hmmm…

There’s a dead chicken in the car park. The bin men dropped it this morning and the neighbourhood cats are gorging themselves. There’s a torn up cheque book, too, and one of the two communal bins hasn’t even been touched. I called the depot to come back and collect it, but they verbally shrugged it off and promised to inquire.

I’ve promised that myself before, so I know what it really means.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2003 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.