Day to day

Looking back at my recent posts I seem to have said very little about my day to day activities. Indeed my activities have decreased quite a lot over the past few months. This was mainly because I was spending a lot more time in Whitby and furnishing and equipping our new flat was taking up our attention.

I have resigned as a school governor at our local primary school and also ceased reading support there. During meetings I find it increasingly difficult to hear all that is said. In general hearing and vision is becoming something of a problem. I have just visited my optician and been referred to hospital for further checks as the replacement lens in one eye is opacifying slowly. I’m assured this is not unusual and easily treatable. I certainly hope so as it is an irritation. Hearing is an issue; Annette says I have the TV too loud. I’m OK on one to one conversations but meetings with several people, some soft spoken, plus all the aside comments are a problem.

Computing and particularly printers have been taking up a lot of time. We have a new portable for Annette which required all kinds of setting up including contacting Microsoft to authenticate the software. I seem to have no luck with printers. I have had several fail over the past few years including both mine and Annette’s recently. One of the WI craft club has given a printer to Annette which after some effort I have got working. The donor had given up on it although it is fairly new. It is as well that new inkjet printers are cheap although cartridges are outrageous.

We like to have an open fire in the winter. This is an increasingly unfashionable thing to have. We have a back boiler linked to our otherwise gas fired heating system so I half convince myself it is fairly efficient. The brutal truth is that even so most of the heat goes up the chimney. I’m also a bit concerned about particulate emissions. We mainly burn ordinary coal as we are not in a “smokeless” zone supplementing the coal with wood. However cutting up the wood into useable portions, while it is good exercise, is also a chore.

I retain my interest in reading and being a glutton I am a member of three book groups. For the moment I’m organiser of our village book group although I’m hoping to step down. I also regularly attend a U3A book group and less regularly a reading group at our local main library. I haven’t yet reached the large print only stage in reading although I do find small print an irritation. E-readers are good for reading the text, it is just that they are subject to a some of the problems of all computing devices. Perhaps I should say that tablets are more incident prone than dedicated e-readers like Kindle. After becoming used to the long battery life of a Kindle that of a tablet is distressingly short.

At long last ( much overdue says Annette ) I’m sorting out my library. Frequent visits to a charity bookshop in Ashby are starting to reduce my collection to a more manageable size. It is slightly ironic that Annette has become a fairly keen reviewer of books and she seems to be acquiring books almost as fast as I’m giving them away. She frequents “Goodreads” and also wins books from Mumsnet and Gransnet.

My literary efforts focused on a book about our village history. I got sucked into this. I wrote a village history for our millennium celebrations. A publisher finding an account of village life roughly1915-1935 wanted more and because he is based in France I found myself editor, salesman and general gofer on the volume we published last spring. As of today we have sold just over half our tiny print run of 128. I am now able to boast I’m a published author albeit on about the smallest scale possible.