There was a photo taken of Hayden and me, on the shore of Lake Taupo, just before everything started going wrong. It’s a self-portrait, Hayden took it with the camera on the end of his arm, and those shots usually work out really well for us. In this one, we’re both looking tanned and healthy. Hayden is staring straight down the camera and looking so sure. I am leaning against him slightly, and I look tired around the eyes, and my hair’s everywhere in the wind and it looks greasy. It is greasy.

We were down at the lake on a reconnoiter, the day before the Ironman. There are other photos from that sequence: of Hayden staring out at the waves and getting all freaked out at how large they are, and how rough, and of the cloud formations and the rain coming across the lake from the south. Everyone kept telling me that the southerlies always blow through quickly and the weather could change in half an hour. At that moment, I didn’t realise how much I should be worrying about the weather. Also at that moment, I didn’t realise that my computer was contracting a virus and that by the end of the next day these two big things that we had been working towards, the things that we moved to Townsville specifically to focus on, would be in tatters.

I think I might have mentioned a couple of times how worried I was about Hayden doing the Ironman. And I should have been worried. It is a ridiculous race, and even though it was greatly shortened due to the rough weather, Hayden was able to get a fair idea of its demands. He’s pretty exhausted now, and he’s been left feeling hollow because the big event that he was training for, the big thing that he was working towards, was cut in half and handed back to him. So I was right to be worrying about him. But what I regret is the way that I totally let my worry for him blot out any kind of concern for myself. I must have thought – though I don’t really remember - that just because I had allocated all my available worry towards what Hayden was doing, that there was no way that something bad could happen to me. So when Hayden asked could we bring my laptop along so that he could download his heartrate data onto it I totally agreed.

Now my computer is broken, I’ve lost all the writing I did over the last two years, I’ve lost all our photos. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I know that I should be out there looking for some crappy admin job to earn money to buy a new computer, but all I’ve done is get season one of The OC from the video shop, and I’m watching the episodes end to end, lying on the lounge room floor eating chocolate. I was slightly pissed off at first, because I didn’t manage to get the whole of season one, only episodes 17 to the end, and I’ve seen those. Episode 17 is pretty much exactly where I started watching the show, in October 2004, just after I bought that laptop, just after I followed Hayden back to Melbourne, last time I didn’t know what to do with myself. Yeah. Irony.