CHANGE IT HAS TO COME

An email from the "Powers That Be" at work recently announced that, after two years of less than robust service, our old personal teffalones were all going to be replaced with shiny new ones in the very near future, which prompted much chunnering from yours truly because, as you are no doubt fully aware, I'm really not good with change.

So, I fretted and I worried, because I can't remember all of the various passwords and addresses that I used two years ago to get the current one working, and I fretted some more and said strange things like "Can't they just leave us with these ones because I almost know how it works now...?" words not really designed to inspire confidence in my ability to seize the future and keep up with the white heat of new technology, I'll grant you.

But then I've always been rather perverse when it comes to blowing my old trumpet and will have a noisy meltdown whilst quietly and efficiently finding that I will get the thing to work fairly rapidly, despite a basic incompatibility between the two styles of devices meaning that the data transfer process is slightly more tricky than it might otherwise be.

Anyway, that's for the future.

In the meantime I had the rather strange and nostalgic experience of dragging my old data from within its circuits and, despite the fact that I seldom use it for that purpose, I found that my life over the last couple of years had been ever-so-slightly mapped out in a hundred or so photographs of things I'd largely forgotten because sometimes a "moment" will happen when you have no other camera equipment on you at the time and grabbing the phone to capture it is sometimes the only option.

So, amongst all of the strange pictures of knees and steering wheels which have been taken as I have pulled my phone from my pocket and hit the camera button whilst handing it to the Beloved when it's unexpectedly gone off in the car, or those pictures of elbows and knees when I think that it's switched off and accidentally catch that same button again, and all of the pictures of documents which I've had to photograph and then email to someone when the scanner has been playing up, there is a strangely eclectic mixture of moments from my life which had been stored upon it.

There are the "official" ones I take of our products as aids to the memory when we have to attend things like the annual trade show, and a picture of a rooftop taken when I was trying to work out how the camera function actually worked whilst I had an idle few moments to stand around and wait whilst we were at a Farmers' Market a couple of years ago, and odd little pictures which were obviously meant to inspire blog postings about thoughts which I then forgot about and never got back to.

There are, amongst others, also some strangely pointless pictures of tiles which I took because I was convinced I saw a face in one of them, a picture of the excitable (and usually quite friendly) dog that some former neighbours used to have which nipped at me one morning, demonstrations of lousy local parking, a vintage clothing fair I'd forgotten going to, several rainbows and clouds, the aftermath of the robbery at the office, and the reference picture I took of the replacement computers which then also got stolen a year later.

There are also images from an opening night at Manchester Museum (including that unexpected sight of the demolition of the BBC building on Oxford Road), various pictures taken in the hospital last year, some IKEA wardrobes which we wanted to remember the look of when we got home, several pictures of snow, Darth Vader with a banana, an apple, some things in shops which I needed to remember later, and, perhaps most poignant of all, a blurry picture of my late mother sitting in her chair in her flat.

Quite a bizarre selection of images, I think you'll agree, and all of which brought back a memory the instant I saw it which is, of course, almost incontrovertible evidence that life is indeed what happens when you're busy making other plans...