Before I came to bed, I had long, long video call with my long-standing University of Winchester friend whom I had arranged to call at 9.00pm. We used to Skype but today used the videolink in WhatsApp which activated within seconds and proved to be mega reliable for both of us. Of course we had a lot to communicate with each with the Christmas comings and goings as well as the events of the past two days and altogether we chatted for a couple of hours we had so much to say to each other. But I slept very much better so perhaps the long call had a soporific effect. Today, there are amber weather alerts over much of the country and we are getting ourselves prepared for a huge dump of snow which will start to arrive at about 8.00pm this evening, According to the weather maps we appear to be just within the border between an amber and non amber alert zone so we have a warning of both snow and ice. This primarily affects our carers, of course, and many of them come from Redditch which has a higher elevation than Bromsgrove so may catch more of the really bad weather, The elevation of Bromsgrove is generally between 200 and 300 feet above sea level, while the elevation of Redditch is 430 feet.
On a more technical note, I am now using Microsoft's Outlook email client much more than previously. This is principally because since I bought my new Amazon tablet, Outlook is made available on that machine so that means that if I save a draft of anything in Outlook, then the same draft is available on either of my two laptops (one in each lounge) or on my main desktop computer as well as the tablet. Moreover, Outlook underlines typos with a little red wavy line which makes them easier to spot and correct. A particularly good feature is that the program automatically saves whatever you are working on every 30 seconds but you can also do a manual save with Ctrl-S. Now many application programs contain what are called undocumented features. These features may be documented somewhere deep in the manuals of the programme if you happen to discover it and some are genuinely undocumented. I discovered that when you load Outlook if you type a ? symbol completely on its own that Outlook loads up a screen of keyboard shortcuts which are incredibly useful and many of them hardly known about. Knowing (from somewhere) that Ctrl-S saves a draft, I wondered if this was documented anyway and this took me into a User forum which is very often the place where undocumented or little known features are shared between users. The most extreme example of this is that very early in my computing career when I had a Commodore 64 and was just getting to grips with one of the first word processing programs made available, I read a tip in a computer magazine to press a particular combination of keys as the word processor program was loading (slowly) from a tape. This accessed musical code which played something like 'Greensleeves' but in four part harmony exploiting every possibility of the sound chip built into the C64. There was a machine at the time called an Amiga that had an astoundingly good sound chip against which the C64 chip could not really compete - but to the uninitiated user, one really looked at one's machine with amazement. I think the programmers call these 'gang sheets' and they were sometimes smuggled passed one's superiors to find its way into a program. Searching online, though, I discovered the following: 'Outlook was released over 25 years ago at a time when there was fierce competition in the email client space. Over the years, Microsoft stole every good idea from the competition, incorporated customer's requests, and continually refined the client. This resulted in Outlook becoming the most capable/powerful email client available.' The same set of posts went to complain that having made a very good program there were several good features in earlier iterations of the program not carried over into updated (improved?) versions of the programs but this is quite common as well.
When Meg seemed well and truly asleep, I judged my moment when to make a quick visit down to Waitrose, which I managed. There I picked up my copy of my daily newspaper and was also fortunate to just bump into two of the Waitrose regulars who were going to have a coffee in the penultimate day of the cafeteria being open. I quickly explained to both of them the scenario with Meg which might have come as a source of sorrow but not a great surprise as they could see Meg deteriorating in the recent past. More importantly, the three of us have decided to transfer our affections to the coffee lounge in a nearby Wetherspoons pub (which atmosphere I must admit I quite enjoy) so all being well we all meet there next Tuesday (and I earnestly hope Meg will be well enough by then for the trip) One of the young staff who typically used to man the cafeteria gave us a couple of vouchers so that Meg and I can have a free coffee and cake on the occasion of the cafeteria's permanent closure but if was explained that if Meg couldn't make it but I could, they would find a way of giving us some coffee and cake to consume at home. This is all very sad but perhaps it is a case of one door opening whilst another one closes. The memories of the cafeteria will stay with us forever and a day, though.
Just before Meg and I attempted a spot of lunch, I thought I would make a start on undressing the Christmas tree and putting away the decorations. This task proceeded little more quickly than anticipated so I got the Christmas tree disassembled it and put its box, the baubles and decorations in another container and all of the tinsel and related stuff in a third. Then I transported all of this upstairs ready for a journey into the loft and I cleaned up the floor and put the furniture back to rights. My son had phoned up saying they could call around and whilst I printed off a large document that they needed, my son and his wife got things put away in the loft. So that is all the Christmas things put away and I am mighty pleased to see the back of things but at the cost of a slightly aching back. I did not want to have all of the Christmas decorations hanging around for another week and I imagine many people across the country are taking the opportunity, whilst snowbound, to put their Christmas things away and restore their houses to a degree of normality (although things always look a little stark for a day or so)
© Mike Hart [2025]