Like Carrie’s laptop dying in Sex and the City, my collection of seemingly insignificant moments suddenly mattered like a magnum opus
Photograph: Westend61/Getty ImagesPhotograph: Westend61/Getty Imagesopened the notes app on my phone to find a blank screen. I froze, agape, like you do when you just realise you’ve sent an email to the wrong person or left your favourite item of clothing in a hotel room miles away.
I’d gone to find something I’d written about my home town after a recent visit, a scant thought at the time. The app was empty. Days earlier, my father had changed a setting on our family iCloud, and the notes disappeared. It was an innocent mistake. But it also left him – a boomer! – incredulous that I hadn’t backed up my phone since February 2020.
Over the past three years, and possibly longer, I have used the notes app as an “always with me” diary. There was no order, no folders, no method to the madness.It housed everything from drafts of Christmas cards to an itinerary for a recent trip to Melbourne to the speech I wrote for my best friend’s university graduation on Zoom. There were movie recommendations, books to read and restaurants to try.
Perhaps most tragically, there were observations on the first year of Covid, when daily life completely changed. When a couple in the supermarket were trying to decide whether or not to panic-buy pasta and tinned tomatoes like everyone else, I wrote down what they said. There were also the good things: kids in dinosaur pyjamas eating croissants by the beach early in the morning because their parents weren’t rushing to work and just how nice that was.
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