Meltdown, again

The computer I've been using, since my own turned flaky, has hit melt-down and lost its hard drive. My backup habits are a bit intermittent, but I am usually pretty good at printing out music in all the relevant stages of composition. Unfortunately, in the last week I have had a spurt of energy on a tone poem that I'd been writing, based on a Sylvia Townsend-Warner story. I'd not yet got around to printing it out so that the conclusion to the first movement and the entire opening of the second have disappeared into the aether (or wherever the bits and bytes from our hard drives go when they die). Very frustrating. As and when I get my new computer (current e.t.a. 10 days) I'm not sure whether I am going to have the stomach to re-construct the missing bits. We'll have to see.

And of course, until then I have to resort to my old, flaky PC. The one which turns itself off without any notice, thus corrupting whatever you were working on at the time. Ho-Hum.