Lost Things

Started this blog a few months ago because I'd written something that didn't seem to belong anywhere else, so I pulled up this site and put it here. One other similar piece followed ... then nothing. When I thought to re-start the site, I didn't understand what these two posts meant, so deleted them. A fresh start, perhaps. Now, of course, I want to have another look at them but they're gone forever - hadn't configured the options so that my posts were emailed to me. They have joined the File of Lost Things.

I imagine everyone who writes has such a File, more or less extensive. Mine is quite large, mainly for technical reasons. My first computer was an Amstrad and, although I obsessively backed everything up to disk, those disks were a different size to the standard floppy and can only be read on the now obsolete Amstrad. Some years ago I tracked down someone who said he could, for a fee, translate them to Word. I sent him money and the disks but, despite a series of phone calls, he never reciprocated. The last time I rang his number it had been disconnected. There's not much I regret from that cache, the only thing I'd like to look at again is a screenplay I wrote, very quickly, around my travels in coup-afflicted Fiji in 1988.

After the Amstrad died, I bought a small Apple Mac laptop. It was stolen in a house break-in at Pearl Beach in 1998, just after I had finished, printed and sent to my publisher the book I wrote about artist Philip Clairmont. If the theft had happened two weeks earlier I would have lost the book - so, although it was a bitch, I felt the timing was in one way fortunate. From that machine I mourn the loss of some personal communications from people who have since died, and two short prose pieces that I was quite proud of but for some reason never printed out. They represented the beginning of an involvement with a form I have come love, though I don't know what it is called.

Anyway, I've been thinking about those two short pieces lately and have now decided to attempt to reconstitute them. They will not be as they were, but at least they will be. I'll try and rewrite them over the weekend and, if I like the results, will post them here. As for the lost two first White City posts ... I'll let them go to god, who was, I seem to remember, their subject.