Our four-legged pals continuously preserve us on our toes with their playful and mischievous antics, however writer Dame Jacqueline Wilson as soon as discovered herself in a fairly sticky state of affairs as a consequence of a canine’s excitable behaviour.
The award-winning writer just lately revealed that she almost misplaced the manuscript for her latest kids’s e-book – The Magic Faraway Tree: A Christmas Adventure – after a good friend’s canine by accident pressed “delete all” on her laptop computer.
Dame Jacqueline then discovered herself within the notably tough position of getting to inform her writer that she wouldn’t be handing in her 300-page novel – not as a result of a canine ‘ate her homework’, fairly, it had deleted it as an alternative.
The 78-year-old – who lives within the South Downs – recalled the incident on the Oxford Literary Festival final week, telling the viewers: “I’m not scared of most things but I am scared of my computer. I don’t like it and it doesn’t like me.
“The most terrible thing happened. We were looking after other people’s dogs and I was being mad enough to try to type on a computer where they could get at me.
“This seems unbelievable but it happened: one dog pressed a button that said on it ‘delete’ and the other pressed ‘delete all’. My actual, almost-finished manuscript disappeared entirely.”
Following the debacle (or ought to we are saying de-bark-le), Dame Jacqueline says she determined to dedicate her novel to the IT technician who managed to retrieve the manuscript. As a consequence, the entrance of the e-book now reads: “To Gary Freemantle, the best technical wizard in the world, with many thanks”.
A pug and a Jack Russell Terrier have been the haphazard dogs in query and the incident took place when Jaqueline was writing on the couch – the place her laptop computer was in straightforward attain for the 2 canines.
The author and her associate, Trish Beswick, tried to get well the doc – however had no luck.
“Each time we tried to retrieve it, we were making it harder and harder,” Jaqueline stated. “At long last, I was told about this guy. He said he would come up and have a look at it.
“He did appear and looked quite disconcerting. His hair was down to his shoulders. He didn’t really look as if he knew what he was doing.
“Well, God bless Gary – within half an hour he had got it back for me.”
