You know how it goes, first the slowness, then the grinding and eventually the total no show of anything. Shit, hard drive where have you gone?! Thus it went with my Powerbook laptop early on Sunday morning as I was trying to upload wedding photos onto Facebook. Rats! I took it to show my dad who can sometimes take computers apart, but he laughed and said I need to go to the Mac fixer, whoever that magic little gnome might be.
Luckily I live close to Mac1, an eccentric little repair shop opposite Spitalfields market which is perversely housed underneath a messy antiques shop. But it turned out that most of their staff were away on holiday and thus I found myself peddling like a mad woman into town to visit their West End branch first thing on Monday morning.

And spending most of the day reading a fine book by Doug Macdougall, Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages, whilst sat on a lovely wooden rocking chair underneath an oversized ficus plant (real and all). Sure, I desperately needed that computer back online, but hell, it's not often that I get to immerse myself in a good book for any length of time, well at least not without feeling unnecessarily guilty and that I should be doing something else. So the experience was not altogether bad.
After several false starts the pesky business of transferring info hard drive to hard drive began, but once that was all completed the fan started whirring away again like a noisy little gremlin in my keyboard, prompting us to wonder if that had been the problem all along. No matter, a fan transplant later all seemed to be okay, except now of course my desktop is all wierd and not how it used to be.
Mac1 director Marc was extremely pleasant to me even though I took up most of his day, and I witnessed him time and again tending to customers with ridiculous queries with the utmost grace and patience, whilst artfully tending to my sick computer with one hand. Meanwhile his son Julian played quietly on his game, having been dragged unceremoniously from the surf in gorgeous Cornwall and plonked down in grotty central London.

Mac1 serves as a handy alternative pit stop for all the frustrated Mac customers who have just been told that there will be a 10 day wait if they put their beloved in for treatment at the Regent Street Mac store. At Mac1 you are likely to get your problem sorted within in the day, and with none of the tedious corporate bollocks that Mac likes to peddle as a unique experience. Mac1 sounds to me like something you do in a fighter plane, oooh I'm coming over all Top Gun all of a sudden - but for all your Mac problems, it is definitely the way to go.