Things I Loved Lately: Wet Laptop Edition

Oh my God, the relief, the bliss, hello, here I am. There is cloud cover! I am in a place where the pollen is a little less virulent! I have three kinds of hayfever medication and at least one of them appears to be working! And I am here writing my letter at last.

Before I forget and people yell at me: my book is on a crazy deal right now and I would love you to either buy it (buy another copy!!!!) or, if you hate Amazon but love me, leave me a juicy little 5-star review if you have had a nice time with the book. I would be extremely grateful. I think the book is going very well, it feels like it is, but I am powerless before the might of the Publishers and they care so so much about rankings and reviews which I try to avoid at all costs. I Do Not Want To Look! But you can look and review it if you want, just don’t tell me what it says. But if we please the review gods maybe I can do another one? Not yet though, I’m very tired.

The last two weeks have been kind of a disaster on two fronts. First, the heatwave, which has turned me into a kind of thick bad human soup, and second, as a direct consequence of the heatwave: while I was in Essex meeting some lovely booksellers, my new waterbottle proved itself to have an insufficient seal, and it proved this by leaking one full pint of water into my laptop case. I discovered this on the floor of the bookshop so I suspect the people of Maldon think I am certifiable now: I howled like a beast.

I took the laptop immediately to a computer shop, where the man used what appeared to be a hot-air gun, familiar to me from the world of, for example, drying off ceramics, and aimed this heat gun directly at the heart of my precious and quite new laptop. Then he turned it on. It turned on! And then, of course, as anyone who knows anything about computers could tell you, it never worked again.

These are the worst possible things a person could do to a wet computer! The man in the computer shop did exactly the wrong things! If I hadn’t taken it to him, I would have a laptop today! Humbling to have tried to trust an expert and to have the expert wreak such total havoc. If I had simply left the laptop in my wet bag— it, the laptop I mean, really was so wet it was dripping onto the bookshop floor— it might have been ok.

Anyway: on my laptop is everything, all my passwords, all my logins, fifty thousand words of a novel. My partner, like the treasure he is, has found the insurance details (thank GOD, thank GOD) and says that he can retrieve everything off the hard drive. To actually action these things, though, requires significantly more mental resources than I currently have spare; and so I’m typing this on an Apple keyboard thing with several keys missing that I have never seen before (why was it in the tech box with my old laptops? Unclear!) and an elderly tablet I use almost exclusively these days for playing D&D. (A recent life update: we are attempting to get into D&D. So far: superb, no notes, like a board game but no reading of tedious rules and you can do whatever you want. Anarchy the board game, minus the board.)

Either the tablet or the keyboard seeks desperately to correct my spelling, sometimes to words I have never seen or read before in my life. “Van—pertúrbeme”, it has just suggested, though as to what that could possibly mean I am deeply in the dark. Van—pertúrbeme? I am sort of intrigued by the linguistics of this technological set-up but it doesn’t make writing easy. I persevere. (Or, as the keyboard just suggested: I prefer beer.)

Anyway, on my laptop also: my Substack log-in.

I kept thinking: there will be a way to get back, there must be a way home; and there was, but I needed— again— mental resources that were being absorbed entirely by thirty-seven degree heat. I have been at home for TWO of the nights in the last fourteen and one of those nights was last night and our house was so moist and hot it was like being inside a steaming mussel.