| Tuesday, January 11, 2005 |
 | can't seem to find any useful receipts for the tax year I'm actually trying to sort out, but as ever failure is far more interesting than success.
A Hewlett-Packard external CD-Rewriter cost £224 in May 1999. This is actually less than I expected. The 2005 equivalent would cost perhaps a quarter of that. At the time, this was big scary technology, delivering strange powers through the parallel port. For the younger members of the audience, those are like USB ports but hella big. If you have a desktop, and run your finger along the back of it, the parallel port feels like a shy hedgehog, and is a port so unhotswappable that you had to clip, secure and bolt with studs and wire any peripheral you wanted to connect. It read and wrote at 2x2x6 (that's the reading and writing speed of a bright six-year-old), and worked spasmodically at best, but when it did work it took mix tapes to a whole different level. A CD Burner, a colour printer and clearly no chance of seeing another human being naked before the end of the millennium, and I was sorted. This was back in the dark ages before compression technologies and capacious hard drives, of course - burning a CD meant copying the tracks as WAV files onto your hard drive, burning them and then deleting them before your system feel apart under the strain on its memory, and could take up the best part of a day. Heady times.
A Storm watch (camera) and heart-shaped lighter, sold by Neil in January 1999, cost £102.98 - £72.99 and £29.99 respectively. This was between breaking up with my partner (November 98 or thereabouts) and the long soupy period of dates, brief relationships, the occasional one nght stand and recurrent guest stars that followed. The fact that this receipt is from Covent Garden suggests it was probably, although not certainly, a post-Christmas shopping trip, possibly actually in the company of the aforementioned ex-partner and friends. That would also help to explain why on Earth I blew what was at the time mind-mangling amount of money on a watch. I didn't tend to behave very rationally after breakups, particular in the company of.
I haven't worn a watch for some time - since I always have at least two items of technology able to tell me the time about me it seems a bit pointless, especially since this particular watch, due to the ingenious lever-operated iris that gave it its name ("camera"), managed to nulllify the two main benefits of looking at a watch as opposed to, say, a PDA - it took two hands and was impossible to do surreptitiously. Both watch and strap gave out a while back and are awaiting repair when I have the time. The lighter, conversely, broke almost immediately. Make of that what you will.
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