Postcards 3

Gone!

At times like this, there are many occasions for inconvenience, regret, and ultimately, grief. By one of those peculiar psychological mechanisms, it seems that – primed by the media with their daily tales of death and disease, misjudgement and maladministration – inappropriately strong emotions can attach themselves to the merest inconvenience. In recent weeks I have seen people fly into a rage over empty supermarket shelves, the length of an orderly, well-spaced queue, or the interpretation by some of "exercise" as a rowdy, drunken picnic in a public space. Within the general grey cloud of acquiescence, flashes of anger and despair are building.

I felt something of this disproportion myself yesterday. Having assembled a preliminary batch of provisional pairings of "postcards", simply by downloading images directly from this blog and dragging them onto A4 pages in Photoshop, the next task was to find the original source files, so that a print-resolution version could be made. This is one of those super-tedious tasks that, at work, one would happily delegate to a junior colleague, but, no matter how hard or how often I look, there is no-one else in the house other than the Prof, who is several notches above my pay-grade, and appears to be running a busy one-woman call centre in the room next door.

Now, an essentially simple task – find the original file from which the screen-resolution JPEG was made, and copy it into a new directory – is complicated by the fact that (a) these files go back to 2008, (b) quite a few different cameras have been used, (c) each brand of camera has its own, different file naming convention, and yet (d) each new camera within the same brand resets the numbering, resulting in multiple files with the same or similar names, and an unhelpfully broken numerical sequence in time, and finally (e) my files are reasonably well organised, but spread slightly chaotically over a number of backup devices. Sigh. As I say, complicated.

However, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, and the trick is simply to get down to it. Which I did, working out and refining an efficient modus operandi as I went along. I'm sure you're aware of the 80:20 rule, which I learned in a library context (20% of stock account for 80% of loans, 20% of purchases account for 80% of expenditure, etc.) but which is a generally-applicable Great Teaching, and certainly applied here. Most of the files were readily identifiable, but a minority required multiple, time- and patience-consuming searches across several devices. And a few simply would not reveal themselves, no matter how hard I looked.

The truth gradually dawned on me. These recalcitrant files – some of them "essential" images, among the best of the best, but not yet safely collected into a book – no longer existed. They had disappeared, irretrievably, in the Great Backup Drive Disaster of a few years ago. Despite the best efforts of a local data-recovery firm, entire years had been erased within certain ranges, and indeed one entire camera had gone, an Olympus DSLR I used for a mere 2 months, but which yielded some beautiful photographs before I sold it on. It was the first time the scale of the loss had truly revealed itself, and I was appalled, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Argh!

For about ten minutes, anyway. Then I saw the funny side: nobody cares! Even if I failed entirely to compile a book of these particular photographs, nobody – not even me – would be negatively affected. As it is, I've still got well over 90% of the ones I had selected, only 30% of which would end being used, anyway. Life goes on. For most of us, that is: two of the Prof's colleagues have succumbed (as in "sadly died") to Covid-19 recently, and I doubt there are many of us who will have been unaffected, directly or indirectly, by this wild-card virus and society's fumbled but well-meaning attempts to deal with it [1].

But, nonetheless, I suspect I may need to take a deep breath and keep a tight grip on a surge of turbulent emotions next time I fail to find bread-making flour or Bircher muesli in the supermarket, after queuing for 20 minutes, or some lycra-clad prat jogs a little too close to me in the street.

Gone!

1. This recent article in the TLS by Paul Collier on the limits of modelling is well worth reading.