Finding What You've Lost

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One one hand, today was a break from having Kate Bush songs cycle around in my head. On the other hand, I had 150 gigabytes of backed-up files to sort through and categorise.

We have a 200GB portable USB disc drive (named "Mort"), which we use for backing up files from any computer that's about to have a new operating system installed, or be canibalised to upgrade other computers. Among other things, Mort contained:

* 8 CDRs-worth of mp3-ed radio programmes - dance and chillout music shows, miscelainious drama and detective serials, and comedy from the last 50 years. So if I want to listen to 20 consecutive episodes of The Goon Show, I can. Probably will in fact, the next time I'm seriously ill.
* Random DivX episodes of The Larry Sanders Show, Dr Who (old and new) and Horizon.
* 25 episodes of Star Trek (the original series). I might watch them instead of The Goon Show.
* 37 songs by Kamakura, and covers of 4 of them by me.
* 8GB of radio and TV work from Chris Morris - my favourite commedian of the kind who never tells actual jokes.
* Some PDF articles on the mathematics of modelling membranophones using the mass-spring paradigm.
* 7000 pictures of naked men. I wonder how they got there?
* 22 mp3s of speeches from the right-wing American religious lunatic, Phyllis Schlafly. I thought they might come in useful one day.
* A lot of entirely mysterious .BAT and .EXE programs.

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I've slipped into a mainly vegetable diet. Not vegetarian - there's still small pieces of meat in the soup, and today's breakfast involved a sausage - but a plate of fried chicken now feels rather...excessive. Lentils, leeks, onions and carrots occupy most my plate now, with apples, pears and dates.

And the result, I don't feel heavy and bloated for an hour or two after eating, and I have a bit more energy. I'm also sleeping better, though that may be unrelated. I'm also eating more, which may be why I haven't lost any weight. Well, that and spending most of the day sitting at computers.

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Ah well, back to Bush. I've got four tracks - Experiment IV, The Dreaming, They Heavy People, and Army Dreamers - and I could do with a fifth. I can't get a handle on Wuthering Heights or Cloudbusting, so I'm thinking either Babooshka or the little known Kashka from Baghdad.

If you look at any of the lyrics, no two lines seem to scan the same, and the rhymes are, shall we say, elusive. Next time, I'll ask for Joan Jett or Kylie Minogue.

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C and me are friends. We rushed into being lovers, then he took offence at the way I portrayed him, and I misunderstood him, and he lashed out at me and I lashed back - unless it was the other way around, I forget. And instead of talking it over we sulked and sniped.

But now we have talked it over, and although we can't erase the past, we can put it into proper perspective. The bottom line is, he's a good man - complicated, passionate and occasionally infuriating to a straightforward, unimpulsive nerd like me. But a good man, and one who is good to have as a friend.