So there’s good news and bad news.
The good news is that I’ve got a new job. Well, more accurately I’ve got a verbal offer of a new job. And while I’m going to sleep on the decision, it seems very likely that I’ll accept: 26% pay rise, promotion back to head of department and the daily return drive down from 75 to 12 miles. So the Minister’s Wife may not have to put out the red light for a little while yet.
The bad news is that the blog-related implications of the Hard Drive Meltdown have now properly sunk in. I have lost, I believe, seven draft SMIPs.
These SMIPs were designed to keep SMIP-related activity ticking over while I set up SublimeMomentsInPop.co.uk, a new, music-content-only site to run alongside the Ministry.
Unfortunately, the design of smip.co.uk needed quite a few SMIPs and some other content for launch and – you’ve guessed it – all the draft launch content has also gone digitally tits up.
I guess the new job means that I may be able to convince the Minister’s Wife to permit me to parcel up the main backup drive and send it to a data recovery extortionist. However, opting for the cheapest available option (£300+VAT) will take six weeks and there are no guarantees of any success. I’ve not currently got the heart to try to start recreating what’s been lost.
And I’m still very dissatisfied with the way the Ministry looks.
So I’ve got the blogging hump at the moment…
Meanwhile, the local news continues to feast on the corpses of the “five prostitutes” murdered by Steve Wright.
In fairness, Look East has almost always referred to the victims as “women”; it’s just the national BBC newsroom that seems to consider prostitutes as inhuman.
In an extended edition of Look East, it was left to one of the victims’ brothers to make the most pertinent comment on that point:
Miss Alderton’s brother, Tom, said: “They were all little girls and in desperate circumstances. It helps everyone to come to terms with it if they think ‘sex worker, drug addict’ but nobody’s anything 24 hours a day and most of the time, in these girls’ lives, they were neither of these things.”
The excellent comedian Stewart Lee, whose latest show Mrs Julesallen and I went to see in a small room in Soho, does an extended routine about Richard Littlejohn’s column in the Daily Mail decrying the use of the expressions “women working as prostititutes” and wanting them to be simply called “prostitutes”. The routine describes Littlejohn going out in the dead of night and scrawling on the girls’ graves.