All righty then. Two weeks off has turned into three weeks off, which is plenty of time for me to forget everything I ever thought I knew about whatever it is I'm talking about. Something to do with writing, perhaps, or not writing, or not something.

Hope you're still reading. I have no idea where I'm going with this.

I've just spent a couple of weeks in Fitzroy while my computer sat in a darkened room in Yackandandah. I spent the first few days without it trying to remember what I did before I got it. After failing at this, I eventually realised that I could use the time to read something, such as one of them old fashioned book things.

But then Shazamajaz lent me a Macintosh Classic. Manufactured in the early nineties, it's a sort of glorified typewriter, minus the glory. It's a very, very basic machine. The only thing it can do quickly is shut itself down. Everything else takes a while, or several whiles. I spent many hours looking at its tiny screen, hoping it would do something useful, and hoping it would do so today. Fortunately, it had an impressive selection of programs: a word processor and a screensaver. No games, no music, no distractions.

So I sat there and wrote stuff. I wrote about what I've learnt in a year of blogging, what I want to do with SoFo this year, what else I might want to do with my life. And I reflected over what I'd achieved in 2002. It was a pretty good year, at least as far as output goes. Along the way I even wrote about a compost bin, and this seemed like forward progress of some kind. But then a lot of 2002 seemed like forward progress of some kind.

Years ago I came across an interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in which he said something like "if you think you can live without writing, don't write." (I think he was paraphrasing Rilke, but I'm no longer sure.) And here's the thing: I don't think I can live without writing. And the last few weeks have taught me something else: while I'm at it, I may as well use good tools. I'll be doing this for a while yet.

But not, I suspect, using a Macintosh Classic.