It’s
still raining! This is the third day; I
may as well be in the Britain – except I understand from resentful looking at
the weather forecast for Cardiff that it has had the temerity to be fine in my
native land! What is the world coming
to!
I did manage to take my walk in a brief
interlude of dryness between showers and then spent the rest of the day trying
to edit my new chapbook, Coasts of Memory.
Every time I read through the thing I find
something else that I want to change. I
don’t mind the substantive editing where I am actually changing words, it’s the
technical editing that always gets to me.
I do have something approaching a final
working draft, but I am nowhere near finished with the final product.
The real problems have developed with the
printing. As I am trying to produce
something in-house I am relying on one of the printers that we have to do my
bidding. This would be fairly
straightforward, but I print out my chapbook poetry in A5 format, which means
that I double side a page of A4 so that the final book is put together using
multiples of 4 A5 pages to one double sided A4 sheet.
The last time that I tried to print out a booklet
I failed, but I failed with the expert help of technicians from Microsoft,
Epson, Brother and Mac. At one time I
was getting on-line advice and help from three continents! It was truly amazing how uselessly helpful
true experts could be! The end advice? Buy another printer! Honestly!
The final resolution to the problem was to
transfer all the files that had failed to my ever-trusty MacBook Air and print
from that! A solution that I am still
using. No matter that I have a state of
the art printer in my study, it finds my up to date version of Word too
difficult to work with! Don’t ask! I don’t understand either, but I do have a
solution that works with a ‘vintage’ laptop and I am prepared to go with that.
As I have added photographs to the
chapbook, my current problem is that the printer refuses to print them in
colour. We have given up trying to get satisfactory
solutions in the damp dark and I will wait for the bright morn to attack the
recalcitrant printer.
Toni
has said that the reason the printer is not working is that I have bought a new
Roberts Internet Radio to replace the white junk in the kitchen and the printer
is sulking that I have a newer piece of gadgetry than her! Given my experience with insane pieces of
electronics, I find that explanation for the non-colour printing of the
document eminently sensible!
As
you might be able to tell, I have embraced the problems with the printer as a
way of thinking about something other than the Covid-19 crisis. But alas, it has only partially worked.
At the moment I am not convinced that any
country in the world has actually got a convincing handle on how to deal with
this situation. I realize that we are in
a dire situation: people are dying and are resenting social separation and
while we are dealing with the medical crisis, the economic and social crises
are gaining traction. The story of the
Great Depression is not an encouraging one, and neither is the long slog out of
the Depression. What is going to happen
when the three months of government paying 80% of wages stops? How far is this government prepared to go to
ease the inevitable hardship that the complete dislocation of economic activity
is going to continue to produce?
The economy must be up and running as soon
as possible, but at what cost?
Our
Catalan class is stumbling towards some sort of new existence: I await
developments with interest.
It
looks as though it is going to be raining tomorrow as well! I will have to lose myself in technical resolution. So to speak.
Tomorrow the colour many not be courtesy
of the weather, thought I hope it will be courtesy of my printer!
