This week's blogpost nearly didn't happen: I am staying up in the Lake District with my best friend, and have forgotten to bring my computer mouse with me. I have my laptop, but no mouse. And I am finding it incredibly difficult, and teeth-grindingly frustrating, to use the laptop's tracking pad. I even had to ask my friend what it is called!
Which has made me realise what a creature of habit I am. With my mouse, I scroll down effortlessly, place the cursor at any spot I choose without effort, and generally just get on with whatever I'm writing. But I am having to laboriously learn how to move around a document, how to copy and paste, how to scroll down, all accompanied with much cursing. Nothing is labelled and I have to guess where to click on the tracking pad to get it to do what I need it to. Grrr!
Most of you will probably be laughing at my incompetence, yet the frustration is real. I have no desire to learn this new skill - I'm used to my mouse, and will return to it on Sunday with little coos of joy.
It has been a salutary reminder that the only constant in life is change and that I need to keep up, and somehow embrace it, rather than reacting so negatively, as I have this morning. I am embarrassed that the lack of a mouse has thrown me for such a loop - I had thought I was more adaptable. I can remember learning how to use a mouse in the early 1990s - my son was three and we had just bought our first home PC. There was a little game, consisting of putting a jigsaw of four pieces together, using the mouse, which my son mastered effortlessly, but I found so difficult....
So I have persevered, and this blogpost is the result.
