Tuesday, 5th May, 2020

[Day 50]

Whilst we were in the park today, we had a very pleasant surprise. Two of our friends who live down the hill are keen gardeners and when we were last in conversation with them, I mentioned that I was thinking about acquiring a lilac tree to fill a gap left by a previous tree that we had to have removed. Our friends very generously have donated a lilac tree to us and it is sitting waiting in a pot ready for us to collect. As it is already quite large, my daughter-in-law feels we might adopt the ‘Christmas tree‘ strategy i.e. we use whichever of our cars is the larger, fold down the seats and have the front end of the tree sitting between the driver and the front passenger. This has worked well over the years so we will have to see if we can adapt this strategy to transport our recently acquired tree.

The afternoon has again been filled with intensive gardening i.e. I am pressing on whilst the weather is quite fine. Progress was quite fast until I encountered a section of garden with a small paved motif. The only trouble is that dandelions have overgrown this area so everyone has to be painstakingly removed (and often the roots can be up to 8 inches long) so that has slowed me down quite a lot. Still, I tell myself, once I get the garden in good shape before the middle of May, maintenance should be fairly easy but the reverse is the case if I don’t get on top of it now.

Some readers of this blog have expressed their appreciation and read it every day so I wondered if I could lay my hands on a similar blog which I had written in the days before the term blog was even invented (in May, 1999!) The story is this. Whilst working at the (then) Leicester Polytechnic, we established an exchange relationship with the Public Administration department of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (often regarded as the Cambridge of Spain) We exchanged students for several years under the EU ERASMUS (later (SOCRATES) scheme- the acronym ERASMUS stands for European Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students. Under this scheme, staff were also encouraged to undertake a period of teaching in their partner university and, to cut a long story short, I was invited to spend a term at the Complutense teaching Information Technology to Public Administration students (in Spanish) This I did in the spring term of 1990 but whilst there, I thought it would be useful to record my day-to-day experiences and to post them back to colleagues at Leicester Polytechnic (in the days before email really became established and also before web pages). I rather had in mind the Alistair Cooke programme on Radio 4 which was called ‘Letter from America‘ and so I called mine ‘Carta de Madrid‘ (or ‘Letter from Madrid’). I should also point out that as part of the philosophy of sandwich education developed particularly in the polytechnics, students were encouraged to keep a ‘diary’ (although Meg and I changed the terminology to ‘field notes’ following our social anthropological roots). At the end of their year, students had to submit a formal report which was marked (and graded) so their field notes were a vital raw material providing a record of their activities and also a vehicle for them to reflect upon their experiences during the year. So that is why the ‘Letter from Madrid‘ came into being – some if it is factual, whilst other parts of it are certainly reflective (no doubt of the joys and frustrations that are a part of one’s novel experiences).    

On a more technical note, the text was written using a text editor which produced pure ASCII text on the grounds that it could then be fed into whatever word processor one wished in order to ‘prettify’ it. Microsoft Word was only one program amongst many (and nothing like as universal as it is today) – I actually taught Word Perfect which was a competitor (and many at the time considered it superior) The upshot of this is that every line ends in a ‘hard’ CR (carriage return) character and to replace all of these in over 3,000 lines of text would take for ever and a day. Consequent, the simple .txt file has been converted into a .pdf file and this should be viewable in all browsers. Here is the URL if you are interested in dipping in or out of all of this:

http://kesland.info/blog/carta.pdf