Free No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses! by Virginia Ironside Page A

of my life. I’d had a bath, done my hair, put on my make-up, and gone out to make some preliminary sketches at the end of the garden. I came back in – it had turned freezing again – and had sat down and written hundreds of words of my diary when Ihit a key on the keyboard, quite innocently, and suddenly the whole screen went blank. It wouldn’t start, or anything. It was just a silent square of black nothingness. I thought I’d lost everything I’d ever put on this wretched computer. Not only had I lost my entire diary, but I’d even lost my New Year Resolution list that said I’d got to write a diary!
    Rang James and he said it was most peculiar and he’d come and take a look. But just as I was about to take to my bed in despair, he rang again.
    â€˜Just one thing,’ he said, ‘I suppose you haven’t turned the screen off, have you?’
    â€˜I didn’t know you
could
turn the screen off,’ I said.
    â€˜Try this,’ he said. And when I did what he said, the whole thing sprang back to life. I’m
sure
I hadn’t touched the button he was talking about, but he said I must have. Crikey. I was about to start on a great rant about computers, but I suppose in the pre-computer age there were other hazards – and far worse. Carlyle must have felt pretty choked when his maid used the entire manuscript of the first volume of his great
oeuvre, The French Revolution
, for kindling. He couldn’t just press a button and retrieve it. Or get in a computer whizz who would, after hours of humming and despairing at the state of his files, eventually magic the manuscript back to life. He just had to start again from scratch.
    That’s not a book I’ll ever get around to, actually. But I’ve got a huge pile by my bed. Just discovered a brilliant author called Patrick Hamilton who lived in the forties and wrote like a dream. Penny’s always trying to get me to read modernbooks, but there’s so much great old stuff I haven’t read. And anyway, there’s so much I want to read again before I get on to the new stuff: Chekhov. Turgenev. Wouldn’t mind rereading all the old Jane Austens actually.
16 March
    It’s so funny, being retired. Sometimes life stretches out before you like an empty desert and you wonder how you’re ever going to fill your days, and then at other times you feel you’ve got so many things to do you can hardly cope. Just as I was imagining my life was pretty much over – no family, no neighbours and Michelle will soon be off to get married at last – the phone rang and it was Penny in a frightful state. ‘Have you seen the local paper?’ she asked, referring to a free-sheet that’s bunged through our doors every so often.
    â€˜No,’ I said.
    â€˜Well, they’re planning to build a huge hotel on the little park at the end of our road!’
    â€˜The one we were admiring just the other day?’
    â€˜Yes,’ she said. ‘And you know, it’s not really a park. It’s actually a common. I’ve looked it up. It was called Rosedale Park in Victorian times, but in the seventeenth century it was part of Wormly Common. They’re going to build a hotel! It would mean masses more cars. Think of the parking problems! It would be hideous. There’s a picture of it on the council website. It looks like an arms factory! And it wouldmean cutting down that huge plane tree – and the false acacia.’
    â€˜But that’s the only bit of green space in the area,’ I said. ‘They can’t do that!’
    Admittedly, although I’d said it was Poussin-like the other day, that was after a very good supper at the Japanese restaurant, and a whole carafe of sake. Although it could be charming, through half-closed eyes on a foggy day, in reality it was a small triangle of green scrub used by local drug-dealers as an open-air social club and