I’ve been working on gathering together the articles I wrote for the now sadly defunct Scottish Memories magazine with the aim of bringing them out as a collection. They were written over a period of four or five years and were illustrated by photographs taken by my father, a keen amateur photographer.

I had copies of the magazines the articles were in but where were my originals that I’d written? I needed them so that I could combine them all in one big file prior to publishing them. So I searched among my documents on my computer, especially in one file clearly marked ‘Articles’. Were they there? No.

I discovered one file named ‘Scottish Memories’. Aha! I thought. This is where they are. Well, three of them were. Only another 17 to find. I used the search button, I used Finder, I hunted through iCloud. A couple more appeared. Then I tried my external drive on which I’d gathered all my files from when I switched from a PC (I refused to begin to tackle Windows 10) back to Apple three years ago. Yes there were some more. Eventually I found all of them apart from one. After ages spent looking for it, I gave up and typed it in again.

And if I thought the hours I spent doing all that was bad, then the hunt for the photographs took even longer. The originals are kept willy-nilly and totally randomly in several boxes. When I started writing my articles, I would spend many a happy hour trawling through them looking for the best to go with the topic. I would scan them in and some I would even remember to save on the computer.

The photo boxes and albums

So yes, there were some in the file marked ‘Scottish Memories’, some in iPhotos, some in a file I had called ‘Images’, some in Photos, some in My Pictures…. yes, they were all over the place. And they all had to have the resolution reduced to a figure suitable for publishing in ebook and paperback form. And as for the ones I hadn’t bothered to save, it was back to rummaging through the boxes again.

All this has taken days, weeks even of disorganised searching and foraging, rootling and fossicking, mutterings about what I plan to do with it all in the future, and promises to do better.

Now I’ve got articles and photos together, I ‘only’ have to prepare it for printing and publishing.

And have I sorted everything into organised piles, files, boxes?

Er…no.

I guess I’m not as organised a person as I thought. And I don’t think I’ll change.