Kids, Cats and a Jeep

About five years ago I decided to ‘splash the cash’, which is quite unusual for me and bought a really high spec home PC. It was top of the range, had huge amounts of memory and even huger (sic) amounts of storage, had a fancy sound card, seven speakers and all sorts of other gizmos. I bought it in the UK and my son and I brought it over on Sleazyjet, long before they introduced excess baggage charges on things like bum bags and newspapers.

Once installed, the family loved it but as we didn’t have broadband because we were too far away from the local exchange, trawling the internet was a bit of a test of patience and therefore it was used for storing music (converting all our CDs to MP3), gaming and processing and storing pictures.

Three and a bit years later and the PC started to go wrong – actually, it just fell over and died! Now I was expecting this because the warranty on our BT laptops expired at precisely 36 months and one day, so I reckoned that these electronic marvels probably had a shelf-life of about three years but I was still annoyed that all our family’s music and pictures were stored deep inside its decidedly dead recesses.

By this time, we had a couple of laptops and, drum roll …….  broadband. March 2008 will be a month long remembered by our family. We were finally in the 21^st century. We could now browse the newspapers without having to go and make a cup of tea whilst the next page was loading. We could actually download music from iTunes without leaving it running overnight. And so whilst the new laptops, ever present in the kitchen and sometimes the bathroom, were much more convenient than the big black desktop, I still hankered after the Mesh’s amazing graphics, its superb stereo sound and it’s pure processing power. Games were old hat by now but it was the photos which caused the most angst. We had ‘lost’ several years of the family growing up. J’s different hairstyles. Shadow becoming a fully grown doggy. Kitty, with and without the tell-tale bulge of nappies, and a variety of other, never-to-be-seen-again subjects, such as the jeep without any dents!  Despite Guy being a computer genius, we had almost resigned ourselves to writing off a whole tranche of Cupples-Hellon-Evans family history.

At this stage you’re probably all shouting, ‘take the hard drive out and get the photos transferred’, but I always think there’s a better (and cheaper) option and so it turned out. On our local ex-pat forum, I simply asked if anybody fixed PCs and within minutes I had received several suggestions. Wolfgang down in Antibes sounded the best. He proposed a fixed charge for his time no matter how long it took to fix, plus materials costs, and to a tight Scotsman, this sounded like a deal, so the big black box was duly delivered to Wolfgang.

A few months later and after regular updates on the progress, or lack of it, we were told the PC was ‘alive and kicking’ again. It was duly returned to its place in the corner of the hall and switched on and there in glorious technicolour were our holidays in Corsica and Kos with the kids looking almost angelic! Our gleaming new Honda Jeep without a single scratch. The bare ground leading down to the swimming pool gradually transformed into something resembling a garden and J’s fifteen hairstyles over the period of 8 years or so.

It was absolutely fascinating looking through all the pictures again. We had only been denied looking at them for a period of about 15 months but when they are there, you don’t feel the need to do so, but, of course, as soon as they’ve been removed, you feel a deep sense of loss!

Anyway, as I trawled through the thousands of snaps (Google Picassa is brilliant for this and it’s free), I came across all of our animals. There was ‘Tigger’ our very first cat who just disappeared one day and whom we had completely forgotten about – cats are such transient pets up here. There was Coco and Lucy (the two feline sisters) who were also to have shortened lives, and then Bijou and her kittens.

At the time, we knew Bijou was pregnant and prepared all sorts of comfortable places for her to have her babies but as the time grew close (we knew cause she started doing strange things), one day she just disappeared. A couple of days later after frantically searching for her, we heard some whimpers from underneath Kitty’s bed and there in a box of old children’s clothes, which J had kept for sentimental reasons, was Bijou with three tiny balls of fluff. Aaaah.

We kept one, Kitty named her Coco (Coconut !!!) and she’s the one in the back corner of the box. We chose her because she seemed such a quiet, sweet-natured cat. How wrong can one be? She regularly beats up her mother and terrorised poor Lucy before she died (Lucy that is) a couple of months ago.

Anyway, we now have the snaps showing that she was once a gorgeous little ball of fluff, and of course a snap or two showing that the jeep didn’t have a single dent when we bought it, despite what J says!