Eternal Sunshine of the spotless C: -- more Dragon tales

Following a particularly virulent virus picked up through carelessness whilst charging around the websites of US academic conferences trying to get costings for a research bid I had to have all the applications on my PC scoured clean and reinstalled (a severe case of digital obliteracy).Sadly this had to include my dragon friend, with all the careful training data that we have been building up over the past 18 months of co-authorship. The consequences have been devastating ...it just doesn't know me any more, its memory has been wiped clean.

It is like losing a friend -- what has happened to all those secret little pet words we use to share? All those cryptic commands that it alone knew the meaning of? All that special vocabulary? All those OU acronyms? How long did it take me to teach it to write literacies instead of literacy is? How can I bear to start building our relationship all over again?

To console myself, whilst I was in NZ last month I sought out and bought the little volume of poems by Fleur Adcock called 'Dragon Talk'. (I've referred to this earlier in this blog). There is only one poem in it that is actually about Dragon - the title one - here is another extract from it:

I do the talking;
you do the typing.
Just try a bit harder
to hear what I say!

Dragon Talk by Fleur Adcock: Bloodaxe Books, Northumberland NE48 1RP