August 31

Not a great deal to report in the last week, as the House isn't sitting until next Monday. Yesterday we had the carpets steam-cleaned, which meant removing everything from the floors, including the one in my office which has always been part of the filing system. It took an amazing amount of work to pile everything up in the rooms without carpets, and then to restore them to their rightful places after the exercise was over. At the same time one of my computers suffered a catastrophic failure which meant buying a new copy of Windows 7 and installing it, together with reinstalling all the programs. Fortunately I keep all my data on two Nas's rather than on local hard disks, and periodically I also copy working files onto DropBox. This free program allows you to store 2 Gb in the cloud, rising to 10 Gb if you can persuade as many as 32 of your friends to sign up to it. That's enough to cover almost 20 years worth of my correspondence, the only problem being that pre-1998 Word files won't open. There must be a solution to this and I'll find it, though its not at the top of my priority list.