mostly david ephgrave

Spinny, spin, spin, spin, went the colour wheel on the screen of my MacBook Pro. Spinny, spin, spin, spin. Would it ever stop? The answer to this question, unfortunately, was "no". After watching a myriad of shades rotate for a good - or bad - twenty minutes, I started to panic.  The time had come to put my money where my mouth was (not literally; unhygienic); to call out the big boys (again, not literally; homoerotic); to plump for that last resort taken by so many before me - and switch it off and on again.  From this point, things went from bad to worse. After an hour's-worth of furtive Googling on various internet-enabled devices, the horrible truth slowly began to dawn: a large chunk of the work stored on my computer could irretrievable forever .  (I'm being over-dramatic to keep you interested.) The most important file I might have lost is mine and Glyn's stand-up show. The show that we're currently hawking around. A good couple-of-year...

This morning I received a text from my mum that simply read, "OM" – and for a second I thought she’d turned Hindu. “Perhaps she’d finally found inner peace”, I thought to myself. Or maybe she’d just been listening to The Beatles song Across the Universe and thought she’d text me some of the lyrics. I didn’t think any of the above, if I’m honest: I’m exaggerating for comic effect. I knew that what she really wanted to say was “OK”; any allusion to mystical Sanskrit was due to a slip of the digits. This is what happens when people of a certain age are faced with modern technology. Over time, you come to expect it. It’s like a few months back, when I was on the phone to my dad, offering him advice before he bought a new computer. He was thinking of getting a desktop PC, but I told him that for the sort of thing he’d be using it for, such as checking his email or internet banking, he might as well just buy a laptop. In...