2006-11-07
Jo’s away moving house this week. As a measure of how we’re on the upper part of the rollercoaster ride at the moment I’ll record that she said to me the other night:“ I’ll have the keys to the new house for the next two weeks. And the keys to the old house. And Dave’s away in Paris for a few days the second week, and my mother’s over to help look after the children while I go back and forward between them, doing stuff. So…I had a naughty thought…you see where I’m going with this?”
And of course I did. And a couple of years ago, certainly four years ago, that would have been enough to start thinking about how I could engineer a few hours away from home in an evening so that we could spend time together in an empty house with no prying eyes and no interruptions. And there were times when we did just that.
But, nice as the thought is, it can’t happen. It would be delicious, but it would be stupid. It would be as near safe as possible, but it would be dangerous.
I bought one of those flash drive key things – room for one gigabyte of information on a very small pocket-size stick. For years I have retained on my hard drive at work, password protected and difficult to find, records of our more juicy email conversations. They are souvenirs of very happy, very committed times and record in some fairly graphic detail things we did, things we talked about doing, things we certainly wouldn’t want others to know.
I’m not really sure why now, but I decided it was time to eliminate all of this from places where someone else might potentially be able to access it. I mean – the password wasn’t an easy one – but it was the same for all of the files. Into one, and you’d get the lot.
So I sat here yesterday evening before I left and copied all of the files across onto the flash-drive. And then I deleted them all from the hard drive and went through and ensured there were no traces left of their existence. And then I slipped the flash-drive into my pocket and packed up to leave.
I got as far as the lift. And looked back at my desk and my computer and thought about how that act of deletion felt. And then – without a hesitation – I went back to my computer put the flash-drive in the slot.
And deleted everything from there too.