An old iron ...

Last week has been a blur, a messy distasteful blur.

Technical hitches, hick-ups and burps have been plaguing the studio ever since the move.

Last week they hit an all time high.

The intensity turned up just the right amount to blow things out of control; over and out of laughable margins.

All my contacts (data of) were spotlessly erased, in one clean swoop (back-ups included!).

15 years of contacts, whooshed out, overwritten, lost, scarperred!

90% is (thank goodness) retrievable but 10% is not and that is NOT good!

Why, I asked myself, am I so floored by this situation.

Simple, the time span: 14 years 11 months 28 days are a massive 5,477 days.

131,448 hours which have encompassed countless meetings, encounters, running into new acquaintances, bumping into old friends, meeting fellow artists, shows, exhibitions, inquiries, interest... a network of varied and treasured contacts.

All, so crucial, so vital to an active studio.

Loosing access to all this priceless data simply gave me the feeling of starting from scratch, of having been brutally shoved back to square one and strangely of being cut off from a part my world...

Horrible flashbacks of landing my old iron on "go to jail, go directly to jail do not pass go do not collect 200" , in an all too familiar game of Monopoly, came to mind...and stayed!

It hurts, it's not fun, it's stupid and worst of all you know just how vulnerable you have become.

Sadly this is not a game.

No roll of the dice can bring on new hope.

I do not have a "get out of jail free" card.

BUT (yep this is a big but!)

I do have: lovingly hoarded business cards, a big black out-of-date Filofax, old postcards earliest dating back to 1995, invites, notes, letters also dated from the last decade, lists (lots of lists...) and they are quite simply my most amazing "chance card".

Who knows, this time next week, I may well be landing my old iron on "go" and collecting a cool 400!