Two months on, no blog, laptop crashed, new PC, new laptop, none of those saved addresses and re-assuring cookies making your computer seem like a friend, an extension of self. All an illusion: who needs a friend who hides so much away, and always wants more, and then relays it far and wide to people who want some kind of a hold of my ‘self’ –  want to know who I am so they can check on me, and sell me stuff, and catch me if I do something dastardly.

It’s all been said before. The world is intrusive, into every corner of our lives. Even on top of Snowdon last weekend I could have been picked up on Google Earth, and who knows who might have been there among the hundered or so on the summit with me.  Cameras everywhere taking pics: I’ll be on a  few, inadvertently, blocking the view. On Carnedd Llewellyn the previous day the cloud came down, and there indeed we have been unseen, unheard, unknown, but with the slight concern we might have been undone had we walked over a precipice.

Half an hour before we were watching a  mountain rescue as a yellow RAF helicopter hovered and winched up below us. That’s reassuring, they come quickly. But there’s another side to that too. We’re never out of range, even of a rescue helicopter. There were also brave souls hang-gliding.

Did they have cameras?

‘Paranoia strikes deep, into your lives it will creep,’   sang Stephen Stills forty years ago.

That’s the real worry. It’s all in the mind.

How to escape: clear the mind, unthink each thought, remove the cookies which track your memories back in such seemingly random fashion. When your mind is clear you’re no longer there,  though the cameras may think you are.