Me Time

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January was meant to be the start of a slightly new direction. Healthy eating, exercise, writing, recording, doing things that I wanted to do. Instead I spent most of it proofreading (and to some extent rewriting) a PhD thesis in return for a few dozen cups of tea and a slightly underwhelming thanks on the Acknowledgements page.

Oh, and a request to urgently proof another PhD - this one on investment risk models used by big banks.

The upshot is that I now know more than I ever expected about why a series of lab experiments on prostate cancer genomics failed, and why banks can't predict levels of debt default beyond "what's happend before will probably happen again, more or less".

But February was to be different. Participaton in FAWM, reading all those classic novels I'd never got around to, and maybe even throwing away the three sacks of paper rubbish that've been sitting in the corner since December.

Instead,

(1) The social service bureaucracy has once again lost my files (for the third time), so once again I have to spend hours filling out a lot of incompetently worded forms, assisted by civil servants who don't understand the system they administrate. They've taken to dealing with their ignorance by telling me it's not their job to clarify the questions they're asking me.

Yesterday there was a form demanding a full tally of my business expenditures over the last three years. That's easy - three pages of zeros. Another wanted me to predict when (if?) the recession would be over.

(2) My laptop contracted a boot sector virus - requiring a complete data backup, disk format, plus OS and software reinstall. Which took two solid days - I hadn't realised I had 75 programs installed.

But there is a bright side to backing up you data - you find things you'd forgotten making, including half-written short stories. So I finished one of them and put it here.

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