Here we go, again!

 What’s the right time?  There’s never a ‘right’ time.

            That could be the questioning start of something very serious, but it’s only me, thinking about how to phrase the restart of my blog.  

I have been woefully remiss in my writing of something that used to take up a part of every day and satisfied that Puritan part of my writing mind that felt that I had to Do Something every day.

I have written books since the last entry in the Blog, but it doesn’t seem to compensate, in my mind, for the dutiful entry day-by-day that together formed an opinionated diary.

I sometimes dip back into the entries and am amazed by how much I have forgotten about so much that I obviously felt so passionately about at the time.  At times, I read the entries as if I were a stranger – and very enjoyable they are too, though I am not always in agreement with the person who wrote them!

 

One of the reasons that I have been hesitant in putting fingertip to computer key is my feeling that I ought to wait until I had something significant to say before I was able to justify starting up the blog again.  But I have concluded that is the wrong approach.  Or perhaps the word ‘wrong’ is itself wrong, and I have been using the concept of significance as a way of justifying my inaction.

I, more than most, should take my Family Wisdom to heart and recognize that “Anything is better than nothing!” and simply get on with it.

 

And it’s not as if nothing has happened in the intervening years, or however long it has been since I last wrote.  But the idea of ‘filling in’ the Lost Years is foreign to the impulse that started the Blog in the first instance.  It was to record my move from Cardiff to Catalonia and to note my impressions of the experience of moving from one country to another and to record the differences in day to day living in Catalonia as opposed to living in Cardiff.

I have now been living in Castelldefels for years, and it feel like home.  Certainly, a recent visit to London for a friend’s ‘significant’ birthday celebrations did not make me homesick, and the weather alone was enough to make me wish to be back by the sea!

So, this return is not necessarily to record quaint differences in living styles that mark the differences in Wales and Catalonia that I experience, but rather to provide me with a daily opportunity to indulge my inclination to pontificate and digress.

 

As a non sequitur to everything that has gone before I would like to indulge myself with a mini rant.

As well as being the only teacher I know who has used the OHP (Overhead Projector) throughout his teaching career (from the Training Year to his Retirement) I was also the manic exponent of the booklet approach to dealing with aspects of my subject.

The start of my teaching career pre-dated the use of computers in school and the use of personal computers, and the photocopier and the reproduction of teaching material was difficult, and we used Roneo machines and Stencil machines and all sorts of messy ways of getting our thoughts onto multiple pieces of paper.

The first plain paper copiers revolutionized the whole way of producing teaching material.  And I photocopied with a vengeance!  

Of course, in the early days, the format of a booklet had to be done in rough, each of the A5 pages printed separately and then counted to see how many pages were in the booklet, and then stuck onto the pages of a blank same-sized booklet so that all the pages were in the right order to be photocopied page by page, to make the final finished product.  Time intensive, but very satisfying when completed.

The computer made things much easier, and when I discovered that the printing program had a ‘booklet’ setting my delight was complete.  This setting took a booklet composed on the computer and sorted out the individual pages so that they were printed in the correct order.  All you had to do was collate and fold and staple and the job was done.

And that was true, right up until the time when the program didn’t work.  The instruction is there in the choices you get before you print, but it simply does not do the job.  And no one has been able to explain to me why that is.  At one time I had experts in Mac, Brother and Word all working at getting the program to work.  And they all failed and did not know why they were failing.

Usually, I have found a way to getting around the obstacles that the non-working program has put in my way, but, as time goes on, so the program becomes more and more skittish and even the work arounds that I have found which compensate for some its vagaries fail to work themselves.

So, I have bitten the bullet and bought a program specifically designed to work with all the programs that I use to print the damn things.  And I resent the fact that I have spent some twenty Euros to do something that used to be bundled with the printer program.

The bought program does work, but my next problem is finding out a way of getting my desktop computer to get the program as well as my laptop.  There must be a way of getting more than one of my machines to have the program, but I have yet to find a way to get my other computer to recognize that I have bought the program.  Of such concerns are paranoia made!