27March1996

My dear folks,

I have been working very hard & have not found time to write to you these past two days. So I am making prompt amends. It’s Friday a.m. I am newly returned from my final overnight shift for a week. Three delicious, delightful days stretch seductively ahead of me. What bliss! What’s more, the skies have cleared for the moment & there’s a comforting sun smiling down upon us. It’s hard to know whether Mavis or I is more pleased. I shall have ample opportunity to explore my latest computer wizardry.

Of course you will be dying to know all about it & I shall not keep you on tenterhooks. For some months now, I have been thinking obtaining 2 items of software, the Oxford Dictionary & a comprehensive anti-virus programme. I should have done so long ago if I had found either at bargain prices. Destiny beckoned a finger on Wed. pm. I needed some exercise & I was contemplating cycling down to the computer stores in Tottenham Court Road for some window shopping when Boots opticians informed me that my new specs had arrived. Now Boots is en route to the computer shops if you don’t mind a small detour ; it was a clear signal from the gods?

So I hauled out the bike & went & fetched the specs & spent 30 mins getting them fitted (of which more later) & then wobbled off to T. Crt. Rd with the world lurching thru the new prescription. Strue’s God when I tell you that I checked every blessed shop in the street for the best prices; there’s a couple of dozen, all run by Asians or Lebanese, a few willing to haggle. With a few (upward) exceptions, prices were depressingly standard. It was in the last shop I visited that I made the purchases - after negotiating a satisfactory discount - of The Oxford Compendium & Dr Solomon’s Anti-Virus Toolkit. The toolkit is very clever (& updated regularly), checking for & chasing any of 8,000 known virus with relentless & lethal thoroughness. Means I can sleep soundly after Netting! But it’s the compendium that’s the joy & really worth a few lines.

It comprises the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the Oxford Thesaurus & the Oxford books of modern & classical quotations. It hovers in the background while you’re working & springs to the rescue when you’re looking for a word. It will offer you either the word or author closest to the letters you type in. Then it’s happy to leap between the 4 books, explaining the meaning of the word, offering you similes & digging out quotations in which the word appears. I typed in “brillig” (from Lewis Carroll’s Jaberwocky) & it had the quote in seconds. It’s quite thrilling. It does the looking up for you, even if you can’t spell, all this on a single CD Rom (that’s now transferred to my hard disc.) So I am very pleased & not planning to buy any more software for a while.

To make my day, the floppy disc stuck on this month’s computer mag (for once) had a really useful little programme on it, a calendar with daily diary. On it, one can note odd events or annual ones such as birthdays & it warns you of anything coming up. It’s neat, easy to use & unobtrusive. I’d recently uninstalled a more complicated model that I wasn’t using. With Windows 95, one can keep all these things waiting in the wings, willing servants ready to attend to one’s needs at a moment’s notice.

So all in all, it’s been a highly satisfying week, on the cyber-front at least. Let me say here a big thank you to you, Ann, for your super letter, waiting on the fax this a.m. And let me finish on the computer front by saying how pleased I was to read that you were continuing to use the computer in your work. I’d feared that we hadn’t had enough time together for the necessary reinforcement & that you might become discouraged.

Do let me know if you would like the little calendar programme (I seem to remember that you were enquiring about one). I shall meanwhile obtain a chess programme for Bob as a belated birthday present. Great news about Alan’s email facility! I went straight to my email on reading your fax to see whether there was a message waiting. But no! American email addresses tend not to contain a fullstop between the initial & surname. English ones do. (Did I omit it in my last letter!) Pse check that he’s sending to: t.benson@bbcnc.org.uk It’s arrival will bring an immediate & enthusiastic response.

By this time, I am more or less used to the new specs (2 pairs) which curve & tint in all the right places, to say nothing of anti-glare & other coatings. I reckoned that if were spending half my life in front of a VDU, it was worth it. Mother, you will be pleased to note that the old “wired-up” ones are no more. The single irritation is that the pair with plastic lenses, while perfectly comfortable, seems to be inclined 5* off the vertical so that I have to tilt my head slightly to obtain perfect vision.