Yesterday, after probably the most productive bout of work I've done the whole time I've been here, my hard drive died.

I swear it has comic timing.

It did this before, just after the most productive bout of work I'd done on our 2007 comedy festival script, an adaptation of which I am now working on. Maybe it's the project. Either way, I am, and shall remain, unimpressed.

They day before this happened, we had just driven to Nowra. Driving to Nowra is a metaphor for progress and civilisation if ever there was one. It's a rough road to get there, it has coffee and an art deco movie theatre and lovely people who do small talk and run bookshops, but its main achievement is a sprawling pod of enormous, cheap shopping centres around which bored youths gather, in many cases with their own children, and eat fried chicken with plastic forks. In the carpark prowls a man in a luminous jacket. The parking ticket guy. "Watch him", say the locals, their eyes narrowing.

If you're at Bundanon, you really have to want to go to Nowra, in order to go to Nowra. You really have to need supplies. If you could eat grubs and moss, you probably would. But, the day before yesterday, we went to stock up. Stew needed a cable from Dick Smiths. I needed a coffee and some fresh vegies. It took forever. The parking ticket guy was prowling, there were products here that were cheaper over there, there we youths eating chicken and effectionately giving each other the finger everywhere you looked. Knowing I didn't want to come back, I had two coffees in order to make it worthwhile. Not having had a coffee for two weeks, I then went completely silly and had to go for an hour-long walk upon my return to Bundanon. Pacing around the farm past wombats, birds, and kangaroos, I promised myself I wouldn't go back to Nowra unless there was some kind of national emergency. Then, fuelled by my two coffees, I wrote prolifically (noticing briefly that there was a funny noise in the computer) and went to bed.

HA HA! said my hard drive. THIS IS MY CUE!

Please, I beg you, back up. Do it now! Leave! Back your stuff up! All it takes is one tiny little thing to go wrong and you lose everything. Doing a backup the previous day, Stew had called from his studio, "Has that file trasnfer finished?" and I had replied, "Yes".

I was wrong. Although I have backed up recently, and I sent one of the most recent versions of the thing I was writing in an email to Stew yesterday, I am yet to discover what terrifyingly important things I have sent off into the ether. Not to mention my software. Not to mention my internet bookmarks from the research I'd been doing. My hard drive, somewhere in hard drive hell, is raising a patronising eyebrow and saying, "Well, you could have backed it all up. It's not like you haven't been here before." It's probably hanging out with my previous hard drive. Playing cards and reading all my old stuff.

So we had to go to frigging Nowra again. The day after I swore we never would. So we did, we went straight back to Dick Smith's and bought another expensive cable. Thanks to some seriously impressive nerd work on Stew's part, although my hard drive is wiped, I have my computer back and I can start afresh, resurrecting the files I did back up.

Still, if there wasn't a gallah outside my window and a week-old lamb in  a cardboard box in the studio next to mine (had a cold night, rejected by mum) then I doubt I would be coping quite so well with my hard drive's sense of humour.

Thanks to Stew for helping me. Thanks to Nowra, as a metaphor for civilisation, for saving me by providing a cable. Thanks to the wonderful Julia for taking me through the Boyd archives yesterday and letting me wear white gloves and marvel at the original Picasso and all the Boyds and Nolans and therefore making an otherwise terrible day completely and utterly worthwhile. I doubt you could every truly complain of a wasted day at Bundanon. Hurrah for that.

So I did it.

I bought a laptop.

As predicted, the captain of The Nerd Herd had high hopes this morning that I would be coming home with a very expensive mega-laptop that can edit films, shoot them, do the on-set catering, special effects, stunts, legals and so forth.

The battle was over before it began, however, due to the fact that the aforementioned mega-laptops are made out of babies' skin or hen's teeth or woven on a loom or something, and so they're producing them extremely slowly, with the result that there's a four month nerding-list, which you can sign up to with the happy pay-off that you are then relieved of thousands of dollars you probably didn't need anyway.

Sadly, I do not fit into this category. I couldn't afford the one I did end up buying, but it was the cheapest option for what I need it to do. Here is a picture of it, alongside a review that quotes Jean Cocteau and uses the expression "sartorial flourish" to describe what is essentially a word processor.

The Nerd Herd will be furious to hear me say this, because the thing about macs is, they're not "just a word processor". They're a sartorial flourish in a world of artless, faceless technology. They're a way of life. They're why we have opposable thumbs. They're not just imacs or ipods. They're an iLifestyle.

Representing, it could be argued, iPoverty. That specific sort of poverty that comes about through the purchase of a mac product.

Still, at least I have a laptop now, which I hope the Captain of the Nerd Herd is enjoying while he very kindly lends me his.

....

All of the above is, of course, completely irrelevant in the scheme of the universe. As much as I detest several rather central elements of Australia's political climate (and our stance on Burma is not exactly shaking my conviction in this regard), it must really set the tone from "disempowering and frustrating" to "terrifying" when your own government opens fire with automatic weapons on an assembly of monks. Go here if you want your name on something the Chinese will probably ignore, but in the absence of having to risk your life to make your point, you might as well make your point. (I must admit I am not familiar with this organisation so I might find out later that it's a front for an anti-earl-grey-tea organisation or something, but until then I reckon it's worth writing my name down).

Enjoy your weekend.

Every person who writes or studies or thinks or reads has a favourite place where they are most productive. I have recently rediscovered mine: here. Quiet, light, friendly, inspiring, divided in subsections that don't distract you away from what you're doing. There's even a cafe next door with newspapers and sunlight and staff squinting at you through hangovers. It's so perfect. I completely adore it and I always have. I used to study there when I was in year twelve and then again during university, but I moped away when it was closed for renovations and I've only just made it back.

I'm sorry State Library. I have loved you all along.

You know, now, they give you free internet, a beanbag room with computer games and a gallery!

But the part I love the most is that I feel so overwhelmed by everybody else's studious determination that I suddenly feel as though I'm running out of time (which of course I am) and perhaps I should get on with things, like these other people are getting on with things, and like I have been known to get on with things in the past (cut to flashback of me in year twelve)... All of which means that I have done more work on my script in three days in the State Library than I probably had pre-harddrive-crash (or pre-crash for short).

Also, after the Library, because I worked so hard, I rewarded myself and saw two films: a documentary about the making of a Cuban film called I Am Cuba, and an actual Will Farrel film called Stranger Than Fiction.

See what you can achieve when you nerd up? GO LIBRARIES!

I am now up to the stage in re-writing my show from memory where I am sure it was funnier. I'm sure it was better. And more clever. And in fact brilliant. I'm sure it had a strangely genius quality about it.

But we'll never know.

Stupid exploding hard drive.

Also, according to the newspaper this morning, I am getting dumber. Having been vegetarian for twelve years, I am now a very shame-faced meat eater, against my finest political and ethical convictions. Now I find out I'm actually making myself more stupid. This might explain my script.

Just as a precaution, if you see me in the street, here is the kind of question I am getting tired of:

"You lost your entire hard drive? What, everything? Don't you back your stuff up? I always back my stuff up. I back it up nine times a day in three different languages and keep copies in four different buildings across five continents and then I send it to myself in a time machine and store it in a vacuum pack in the future."

And, to save time, here is my answer:

NO I DID NOT BACK MY STUFF UP OKAY YOU SMUG PRICK? I WAS BUSY. I HAD THINGS TO DO. I WAS "PLANNING" TO BACK MY STUFF UP. I WAS UNDER INSTRUCTIONS FROM RITA TO BACK MY STUFF UP. I DID NOT BACK MY STUFF UP. AND YOU KNOW WHAT? I HAVEN'T DONATED BLOOD FOR MONTHS EITHER. AND SOMETIMES I SWEAR AND QUITE OFTEN I FORGET PEOPLE'S NAMES AND ONE TIME I PLAYED A TRICK ON MY SCIENCE TEACHER BECAUSE I KNEW SHE WAS DEAF IN ONE EAR. I AM IN IMPERFECT PERSON IN MANY WAYS. BUGGER OFF, FOR INSTANCE.

That is all.

(Except this. Anthony Lane on Zellweger. Oh yes).

Me to the guy in the hard drive fixing place: Hello. What's the news on whether there's any data I can save from my entire last three years worth of writing?

Guy in the hard drive fixing place: Well. Er...

Me to GIHDFP: That doesn't sound good.

GIHDFP: It's without doubt the most damaged hard drive anyone in here has ever seen. I did a whip around. They all agree. Nobody has ever seen anything like it.

Me: Oh God.

GIHDFP: I can one hundred percent guarantee that you will never, ever be able to recover even a trace of data from it.

Me: Not even a little trace?

GIHDFP: When we turned it on, we heard a grinding noise. The heads on the hard drive were cutting into it.

Me: I hate computers.

GIHDFP: I'm so sorry.

I am re-writing the comedy festival show from memory.

I can't help but feel a little persecuted. Worst they've ever seen? Is someone telling me something? If they are, I wish they'd pipe down. A broken wrist and a broken hard drive are a slightly heavy-handed way of telling me to stop writing. Surely the carrot approach would work better than the stick. Offer me a highly paid job doing something else and I might stop writing. Break my arm and my hard drive and you'll just give me more material and get me really peeved.

You have been warned.

So the Sydney Festival was... well, it was fun at first.

We saw a few things, including the brilliant Small Metal Objects, the staging of which takes place at a train station (Circular Quay) and which broke down so many of the squirm-worthy pretensions that form the backbone of most theatre I seem to go to. It was truly inspired. If you haven't seen it: the actors converse into the headphones of the audience, who watch the crowd until they locate the bodies that match the voices. So you're hearing a conversation and you're looking at the crowd of (real) people at the station who don't understand why there's an audience with headphones looking at them, and then suddenly you realise two of the people in the crowd are the people having the conversation into your headphones. This does brilliant things to the way you watch/are watched/watch other people being watched etc that really makes you think. Add to this the fact that some of the performers are intellectually disabled and suddenly there's another dimension to the people looking/being looked at/"what's going on here? You looking at me?" scenario that already exists in a crowd of people looking at each other.

It would have been interesting to see the show on a weekday, when people at train stations behave differently. I saw it on a weekend, when people were slow, and curious, and bored. Hence there was a man who danced for the audience (what are they looking at? he asked his friend and then gave us something to look at, in case that was what we were there for). There was a group of young boys who circled one of the actors in a way that could have turned out to be threatening, except that all of us were watching, so it didn't.

I know most sensible people have already seen Back to Back theatre performing this show before, when it was in Melbourne, but I hadn't seen it. I'd see it again though, before the troupe (originally from Geelong) takes it overseas and gets famous. I recommend.

Anyhoo, then we went to see a Beckett play, at NIDA. Tell you what, if you've got any spare cash, you should get it down to NIDA pronto. Tin shed, that joint. Smell of an oily rag. Check out the foyer for instance.

Beckett was wonderful. Here is a photograph of Barry McGovern, but only because I can't find an actual photograph of his voice. Gorgeous voice, gorgeous performance, beautiful words, and all in all it was a fantastic piece of theatre with all the artifice that so often forms the basis of the aforementioned pretensions, but with none of the pretensions. Here is a review.

Then, on Sunday, when I had planned to work on my play, my hard-drive died and all my writing was lost. My writing, my notes, all drafts of the comedy festival show since early December... all gone. Forever. Back to the theme of this post: drama, with no pretension.

Back up your files.

Since then, I have been reading about important things like the abduction of children, the meltdown of the planet, the David Hicks situation, and war. Comedy Festival scripts and writing collections are really not that important.

Still. Back up your files. Now.