I went to the kitchen and put on a new pot of coffee. By the time the green bar showed 70 per cent I had finished drinking a second mug of coffee. I went to the toilet. I fretted with papers lying untidily on my desk. I walked around the garden. At 75 per cent it was seeming to slow. I went down to the beach and for a while watched the placid waves breaking against the shingle – the day was at last growing a little cooler. At intervals I returned to my study, hoping to find that it was over, but after the bar passed 85 per cent everything seemed to slow down even more. My hard disc continued to read or accept installation at high speed. Old files were still being deleted.

Finally, 100 per cent was achieved.

The monitor image returned to the pale blue screen, but my hard disc continued to run. I was tempted yet again to eject the card, reboot, hope for the best, but the instancy of the warning messages made me wary.

A new message appeared: Enter your location.

A pulldown menu was alongside, listing, as I quickly discovered, every island group in the Dream Archipelago. I scrolled down, fascinated to see this lexicon of the islands. I was astonished by the number of island groups whose names and therefore locations were unknown to me – I was surprised anyway by the sheer number of them. I press PgDn at least ten times, and I was still looking at island names that began with the letter ‘A’. The list did not even include the many large islands, like Dearth, which stood alone in the sea. (Solus islands had a separate sub-menu, selectable at the top of the list.) The vastness of the Archipelago was something everyone was constantly aware of, but to see this listing of names was daunting and impressive.

I scrolled down to ‘Salay Group’ and clicked on it. The five inhabited Salayean islands were then listed. I clicked on ‘Raba, the fourth’.

What is your specific area of interest on Salay Group: Raba, the fourth?

The choices presented below were, to say the least, numerous. There were several main headings, the first of which, unsurprisingly in view of the principal activity on Raba, was Financial Services. It was pre-checked with a boxed tick.

But there were many more: Tourism, Retail Trade, Air Travel, Police, Arts, Social Services, Waste Disposal, Medicine, Building and Design, Topography, Hotels – dozens more, each of which, after a single click, produced a new list of subsidiary ‘specific areas of interest’.

As an experiment I clicked on Arts, then on Literature and Books, then on Fiction, then on Novels, then on Commercial Novels, then on Writers, then on Detective Thrillers . . . but suddenly some instinct made me pull back. This was going to be about me!