M Y computer broke down last week. Initially it developed a serious, potentially fatal attack of paralysis. I think it must have been given far too much to do (I know the feeling…). I tried to restart it, but it merely blinked at me with its one square eye, and spun round and round in an endless loop, never getting off the first page. Poor thing, I thought — it's sickening.

I looked at it with a frown, knowing there was nothing I could do. Being a bank holiday, I left it alone for three days. Inert and lifeless, sleeping the sleep of the un-dead — a square black hole on my scarlet desktop.

For three days I didn't know what had happened to my world. All my daily routines were gone. I couldn't write, I couldn't email, and I couldn't look things up on the internet. I felt as though I had been cut off, sliced apart, and severed from the life I thought was mine. Every hour on that first day, a thought would pop up in to my head and prompt me to return to the crime scene. "You need to do this," it said, "you need to do that", "check this out and check that!" And every hour, along with the thought, I would get an awful jolt of remembrance, which told me that my "friend", the constant in my life, was no more, and I wondered in those bleak moments how on earth my life, as I knew it, could continue.

On the fourth day, I took it to Ivor for fixing. I gently handed over my sleeping friend in the black box, and pleaded with him to work a miracle. At the time of writing, he still has it safely tucked away somewhere in intensive care.

However, something extraordinary and most unexpected has happened to me since my computer has been gone. I have re-discovered my world. I've learnt how to write with a pen again — it's slow I know, but somehow the words are more personal and meaningful. A page of abstraction, full of squiggles, arrows and blotches, could only ever come from the hand of TDV.

I have got out more too, and found myself in the library in Barnstaple. It is a place as a family we love, but now I've been in there nearly every day, and I've done everything I needed to do computer-wise on the library machines upstairs in the half an hour you get for free. I've had more time to spend in the heart of my family too. Scribbling notes and drawing funny faces has been fun to do alongside telling stories and baking cakes.

I hadn't realised just how much my friend in the black box had taken over my life. Addicted? Possibly. Being the first thing I thought of when I woke up in the morning, and the last thing I did late at night — I can see now how the scales had tipped the wrong way.

So how lucky was I to get this opportunity! To see how too much of anything can become detrimental in the end. When my friend returns, fighting fit and firing on all cylinders, it will find some changes have taken place around here. It's not going to get my constant attention anymore; like some over-demanding puppy dog, it's going to have to learn to self-soothe!

I have found the balance in my life again, and I've found my pen. The computer is going to be moved out of its comfortable place on my scarlet desktop and plugged in somewhere else less evident. A place more suitable — where I will only use it when I really need to.

triciadevoysey@hotmail.co.uk

www.triciadevoysey.co.uk