Ankles, eMacs and other disasters

They say disasters never come singly. Whoever 'they' are and if you know who 'they' are, please can you give me their names and addresses so I can go round and complain.

All is not currently well at Hedges Towers. Four weeks and two days ago, as I was walking through St Albans to collect the grandchildren, my right ankle gave way suddenly, pitching me into the middle of the street. Not the first time it has done this, unreliable body-part that it is, but by far the most agonising.

Such was the pain coupled with the shock, that I just stayed where I ended up and howled. A car edged slowly round me without stopping. I howled some more. Finally, a nice young woman approached, asked if I was OK (clearly not) and suggested it might be a good idea if I got out of the road.

It appears from the subsequent X-ray that I have torn a ligament. Over a month on and I still can't see my ankle bone and there are interesting blue areas in unexpected places. Oh yes, I hear you chorus, now you'll have lots of time to write the next book. Lucky you, wish I could bust a ligament. Ah but you see, gentle reader, you are reckoning without the 'never coming singly' rule.

My beloved eMac has died. For the computer experts reading this: something has overheated/melted/ buggered/come unattached and I can't access the Hard Disc Drive. For the rest of you: 13k words of the next book are currently stuck inside a dead computer.

A frustrating evening has just been spent in the company of Brian the Super-Techie, a special cable and his reserve Apple Mac trying to access my files. We turned the computer on and off many times. We held down C keys, P keys and T keys. I said F rather a lot.

We ran a diagnostic CD: everything was OK apparently, just not OK enough to let me get at it. We watched an interesting video about taking an eMac apart to extract the HDD. There was a bit where the bloke on the video said : 'Uh-oh, you really want to be very careful if you do this, as it could all explode'  which was a tad worrying.

Trying-to-be-helpful people have said: 'Surely you could just re-write the first part of the book?' Or 'You could always carry on from where you got up to.' Oh, if it were only that easy!

 Last night I dreamed I was trying to remove the hard drive from my 2CV. Makes a change from Manderley, I suppose....