Tree in the moat

The brother-who-can-do-everything told me it would be an inefficient use of petrol if he drove to Oxford for his booster without dropping into mine with his tools to find out why my 13-year-old PC wouldn't switch on.

So after I got back from my stint minding the XR stall at the Green Fair (too many leaflets and not enough stocking-fillers) he called in, applied wires and meters to various bits of metal and told me the motherboard was dead. I extracted the hard disks (one born of this PC and one a stepchild from its predecessor), wrapped them in foil and I will see at some stage whether I can retrieve the very few things I hadn't backed up. 

He decided to make his fuel-use even more efficient by testing my inert blood-pressure monitor. Yes, also irretrievably dead.

So gradually my house is emptying of stuff, which is as it should be.