17 April

Hello I'm Andrew. I’m trying an experiment today.

I have a lovely new Apple Macintosh computer. Well actually it's a Macmini, one of those little square boxes that fits neatly on my desk and plugs into a monitor. Well, actually it fits neatly onto the desk in the downstairs spare room in L’s house which has become my workspace during Lockdown. For a long time we couldn't get anything like Internet access down here which was a drawback. But last Christmas K brought us one of those things that plugs into your plug socket and bounces the signal around the house. The plug socket thing is right next to Macmini box and it’s working fine. Curiously, if you put it in the plug socket on the floor I get no signal at all; but from the plug socket on the desk it works perfectly.

The Mac has got a built in dictation programme, so I thought I would see what would happen if I dictated my diary today rather than type it. Obviously I'm going to go back and check what I've said, check what I’ve said, that it still makes sense, but I am going to edit it as little as possible. So this is very much me speaking instead of writing.

So: I’m sitting at the desk in the spare room and I’m trying to type up my notes on Proceeds of Death, which is the last story in Tom Baker’s second season. I’ve watched all six episodes and typed up notes in Scrivener, which is the ideas processor that I use. It is probably over-engineered for what I need, really, but it is very good because it lets me break documents up into lots of small documents and move the sections around. I am breaking my notes on the story into small sections based on the different things I’ve written about: the Doctor’s character, Sarah Jane, the villain, the violence — because it’s a very violent story, notoriously violent — and then I’ll put those sections back together and see if it still makes sense. It won’t go out on Friday but it should go out on Monday, and then I am done with Tom Baker for a while. I will write about the two remaining Jodie Whittaker stories and then do something else entirely.

I am sticking relatively closely to my plan to take weekends off from writing and read bad books and watch genre TV instead. Hopefully I will get to the end of the Netfux Luke Cage tomorrow. We watched Ant-Man and the Wasp last night, which is the only Marvel Cinematic Universe movie I missed. It was quite good fun.

I find I've drifted into a quite satisfactory routine: I am getting up early and doing some writing until lunchtime, going for a walk, and then hanging out with L and watching movies and chatting about the Plague.

I do miss going to gigs. I have watched some of the live streamed gigs that out of work musicians are doing. I will certainly watch Luke Jackson’s live request show later this evening. But I don’t quite have the patience to sit and watch singers singing in their front rooms for hours. I know R watched all eight hours of the Folk on Foot “festival” last week. He’s keener on folk music than I am…

But apart from gigs and shows I could happily live like this forever, eating, writing, walking, reading, watching, chatting.

Still no word about whether Bristol council is going to think of something key for furloughed librarians to do.

So: that’s me talking into my new computer. I’ll do another entry on Monday, probably with my fingers.