Sunday 15 March 1998
My dear folks,
Good morning to you from a grey London. Old Mave has wandered in to see what's up, found nothing of interest, & wandered out again. Sunday morning music is coming from the lounge, courtesy of Radio 3. There’s the twittering of birds from the garden and the occasional grumble of an overhead aircraft. The city seems to be at peace with itself.
I have bought myself one of those programmes that enables one to speak to a computer. When it works, it works amazingly well. But it has absolutely no sense of context & the most irritating habit of deliberately misunderstanding one. Some sentences go down in as little time as it takes to speak them. Others require five minutes of fiddling about with, that is, if you play by the book and do verbal corrections rather than grabbing for the mouse and keyboard in sheer bloody frustration. (Try explaining to a computer that you want ‘grumble’ and not ‘crumble’ or ‘rumble’, and why doesn’t it bloody listen to what you’re saying!)
I truly empathise with those parents who can be seen wandering desperately up and down, cradling a squalling infant who is deaf to every entreaty. The sellers of the programme warn you that you have to spend some time training it to the way you speak. But it is a little bit like adopting the cutest-looking, curly-haired child only to find that it comes pre-programmed with a totally different set of ideas. Also, the programme is very memory hungry & it stops regularly for up to 30 seconds while the hard disk grinds away doing the millions of calculations necessary. I have had a brief word with Dan computers who assure me that it is the simplest task to adjust the settings after inserting additional RAM chips - & that’s next on my agenda.
The reason I bought it that I have run into a bit of RSI as a result of too much keyboarding & mouse-work. But I am beginning to think the RSI the preferable companion. Persistence is clearly going to be called for. The programme has made me think much of the conclusions that Steven Pinker draws in his book ‘The Language Instinct’ about the way we anticipate what a speaker is about to say – and the vast selection of phrases & contexts that we constantly draw on. It was a very satisfying book, especially if one is willing to skip over the denser sections.
Now I’m in to Michael Hawkins’s Hunting Down the Universe. He’s trying to sell the notion that the missing matter is in the universe is contained in vast numbers of black holes. Unfortunately, he lacks Pinker's elegant phrases and does himself no favours with a turgid introduction. Still, the book contains some of the loveliest photos I’ve ever seen of supernovae & other mind-blowing galactic events and I hope the coming chapters prove equally rewarding.
I am getting used to the idea that I have only two weeks remaining with the BBC. Jonesy asks me from time to time whether I am having second thoughts. The answer is a resounding ‘no’ - none whatsoever. I did wonder for a short while, after declaring my interest in redundancy, whether I was really ready for it. It was, however, a very short while indeed. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the notion. My dread this previous month has been that the BBC would not see its way clear to doing a deal. My patience and Jones’s were both sorely tried as we awaited the outcome. My thanks to you for the many kind thoughts that have come my way.
Jones will be back in London this coming Thursday. We then have 12 days to wrap up our London lives before taking the Rocket down to Portsmouth & the ferry on the 36-hour voyage to Bilbao. We are giving ourselves 2 days to drive down to the Quinta & several weeks before I return to London to sort out our affairs here. Today I am to have lunch Stef & Herman with whom I have many things to discuss.
Among the interim arrangements I am making is the cancellation from the end of March of the second phone/fax line into the London flat. So those of you who still have the 2664211 number pencilled in, please pencil it out. It’s about to vanish. 2864592 will remain as a phone and fax number. From time to time over the weekends and evenings it may be engaged for lengthy periods while I’m surfing the net – something that I have been doing on the other number.
I cycled into Trafalgar Square on Friday to fetch my newly-renewed passport from the SA High Commission & then on to Hammersmith for a long session with a financial adviser. I was very grateful for the latter because the pension-option explanations from the Beeb were so confusing that it took 2 phone calls to the pensions department for us to straight things out. I finished the day with an 11-hour session at Online and cycled home in the early hours of Saturday morning. I have the weekend off.
Rather later the same morning, I called Bevan to see how he was placed. He had been out on the tiles, as was evident from very sleepy voice. We met in St Johns Wood to view a flat whose details he had received from agents. But the owner, who should have been expecting us, wasn't & after kicking our heels for 10 minutes, we walked back to Shirland Road. The only person who did well out of it was a charity collector into whose box I emptied a pocketful of coppers while waiting for Bevan.
After lunch (Mr Sainsbury's admirable microwaveables) we headed for Leicester Square see "Mrs Brown" (the tale of Queen Victoria's relationship with a Scottish servant). A bus appeared as we left the house & we sprinted to catch it. Bevan confessed himself quite impressed by his uncle’s turn of speed in extremis. (I blessed the surgeon who did the miracle on my back.) "Mrs Brown" was excellent. I heartily enjoyed it & I suspect that Bevan did too, although he doesn't always confess these things. We stopped off in a pub on the way home. I find that Bevan has bad effect on me when it comes to pubs. (Strangely, he says the same thing!)
Let me take myself off to lunch.
Blessings ever
T
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