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A very disruptive night with my stupid youngest child who thought he was going to be sick, but wasn’t and was insisting on seeing a doctor because he had a tummy ache, the monster. In the end I just slept in with him, or rather he slept and I nearly did. How I got through a morning and a bit of the afternoon looking after him, I don’t know, but I managed to play through the exhaustion and he’s now served his chicken pox sentence so will be back at school on Monday. Thank fuck for that.
This week I have been a bit bamboozled by the loss of an app on my phone. I didn’t know where it had gone or who was responsible and I didn’t even know which one it was, BUT on Monday (I think) I’d noticed that one of the apps on the main screen of my iPhone had GONE. My kids had been playing with the phone, but I’d also been doing my meter readings and there was every possibility that the delete or move app function had been accidentally activated and then an app had been deleted or moved.
The strange thing was that for the life of me I could not work out which app had gone. Even though this must have been one of the main apps I used, because it was on that front page. It was most confusing. Everything had slightly moved place of course too, so occasionally I would think I’d worked it out - oh there’s no Audible app, so it must have been that. No, there is it, it’s just moved up a row.
How could I get to Friday without working out this conundrum. Surely I use everything on the main page at least once a week. I had planned to write a blog about the mystery (and look I have) as I assumed by now that I’d never work out what I’d lost.
But tonight I went to turn the central heating back on - it’s been off all week, because I am not a billionaire and the weather has been OK - but the night was cold so I assumed the morning would be. And there was no Hive app. A ha, I had found out what had gone. It hadn’t even been deleted, just moved into the folder with my music apps that sits next door to it.
What a rollercoaster it had been though. And very much a story of our times. In the future either apps won’t exist or there will be some kind of safety procedure in place to ensure that they can never be deleted or moved without more checks. In ten years time we’ll all either be dead or be able to control all our appliances from a chip embedded in our frontal lobe, so people will laugh at this archaic problem.
It wasn’t the finding out what had gone that was the exceptional thing, it was the length of time that it took me to solve this puzzle. If there hadn’t been a cold snap then it might have gone unnoticed until the autumn (or at least the next time I was away and needed to turn the hot water off).
It’s also quite an important app, especially since the price rises, as being in control of when the radiators come on and being able to switch them off from anywhere in the world, can probably save tens if not hundreds of pounds a month. But when it wasn’t there I couldn’t see that it was missing.
A lovely RHLSTP book club with Francesca Stavrakopoulou came out today.
Listen here. Worth it for the intro alone where I am once again confirmed as the fourth funniest person in my family. I highly recommend God:An Anatomy which has just been nominated for a big history book prize and quite right too.
Buy it here or wherever you like to get your books.
I recorded next week’s show today with the very honest and open and super funny Rachel Parris about her book “Advice From Strangers”
- so buy it now if you want to read before you hear the chat.
