I went down to the iconic Fremantle on Saturday to the iconic RPYC yacht club on iconic Fremantle Harbour. It was, y’know, a, y’know, wintry, rainy, y’know, day, and y’know, I was a bit y’know, cold. But in such an iconicly great y’know, location, I doubled down on the food and y’know, drink, and met y’know, lots of iconically great friends, y’know.

And we doubled down on Alex’s birthday, y’know, ’cause she’s such an iconic woman, y’know? She knows how to y’know, talk without upspeak. Y’know? Yeah, no. It was … yeah.

I am so sick of these cliche words! Iconic has become the worst cliche of all time, I think. Double down is the latest, appearing in the last six months, and every journalist in the world has decided it has to be used.

As for y’know, y’know? Listen to people on TV or radio these days. They cannot speak without saying “y’know” every fourth or fifth word. It’s an epidemic, a blight, a worldwide infection, a pandemic of y’knows.

I try very hard to avoid using these words myself, but even as conscious as I am, I find a “y’know” creeping in occasionally. I manage to avoid the other two, though.

Upspeak? It’s the way young people speak with an upward inflection at the end of every sentence, as if asking for the listener’s approval. That’s when they’re not using “like”. Like, y’know, I was at the movies, like, and I saw my , like, boyfriend, and like, he was y’know, gross. Like.

Uuuurrrrrgh.

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I have more than 150 rather nice images of Fremantle, that historic city, taken since 1976. These are just a few. All images © PJ Croft 2016

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Having a bit of spare time recently, I’ve started the mammoth job of ripping all my CDs. When I moved house three years ago, to save weight and bulk I took all my more than 1,000 CDs out of their cases and put them into soft sleeves, then into plastic boxes or albums. I saved the case inserts so that I can refer to them.

That means I’ve got nine boxes of about 50 discs in each, plus another six large soft cases with at least 50 discs in each. That’s just the discs in the boxes or albums. There are many others on shelves and in stacks.

It’s become so bad that I no longer know what I’ve got and I can’t find discs when I want them.

So I’ve started the ripping process. I’m taking the tracks off as .wav files, unchanged from the CD format. If I want mp3s, I can just make copies. It’s all automatic these days. The thing is, you can go down in quality, from wav to mp3, but you can’t go up, from mp3 to wav.

I’ve done three boxes so far, 125 discs, occupying 65GB. That’s taken about a week of 2-3 hour sessions on a few days.

Two problems: what do I do now with the physical discs? And what do I do with the paper booklet inserts? I suppose I could advertise the CDs on eBay or something?

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I think I’m going to have to have the gastric sleeve operation. I’m finding it harder to keep my blood sugar under control, my legs are getting worse, and I can’t seem to get my weight any lower. I need to lose 20kg or better, and keep it off.

It’s a drastic step, but the fear of the ravages of diabetes is a good incentive. Besides, I’m sick of not being able to find decent clothes in my size.

This means I’ll forget about car changes and eastern states drives for now.