So the Holiday passes slowly as it always does for me, now that I claim adulthood. Slowly, as if remembering might bring back the images of childhood, but fails.

So where are the gifts? So unimportant, when the best gifts we can give are to our future, and the future of our children. Doomsday Eve, only six days off, the end of this world and the beginning of the next, but that's each day, anyway.

We have so much future, too much future, and the past becomes harder to keep, and what is kept, more difficult to understand.

How many of your hard drives have crashed? Are you like Iain, who saves email for a moment, or like Paul, who saves it for twelve years? Which of them is accumulating knowledge?

I bought a Macintosh which was made in 1990, not quite a replica of my Mac SE. The shape is familiar, but it looks so out of place, odd against the skyline created by a dull Power Mac and a zippy Dell. But the danger of upgrading to Mac OS 8: old disks are no longer read. The disk drive mechanism is still the same, but the software now chooses not to read my miserable plays from 1986, or other miseries. That is little more than ten years.

So we have a future, but not a past.

Perhaps we need to create a gift for our collective future.