Hard times do not get the best of me.

The best of you goes quiet during this, and quiet gets mistaken for gone. The humour, the patience, the thing you're actually good at — all of it downshifts to keep the essential systems running.

Ask anyone who has sat out a long illness and then come back to a piano.

The hands are stiff for a fortnight and then they aren't. Nothing had been deleted; it had been parked.

Whatever version of you is currently offline is not lost property. It's a rationing decision, made by a system that has worked out correctly what it can afford this month.