Mistakes: with paragraphs omitted, perforce

Just to bring you up to date on the situation described in "Bells", the previous post, I still can't make paragraphs, and the tinnitus has become part of my life so I am less aware of it. It's like being in an airconditioned room: after a while, you don't notice the hum. The other point is that I have re-thought the touch-typing thing. I realised that parking fines and fees for the course were totally without connection. It was a sort of punishment for having incurred the fines to make myself pay a similar amount: the kind of inverted logic that has played rather too large a part in my life. The Father of my Children used to say I had a 'rent box' mentality. I think he meant, money I had put aside in one tin couldn't be used to pay a debt due from another. The above logic - if you can call it logic - would have been a related example of the phenomenon. Anyway, I have found a course that, realistically, I can afford and I am really looking forward to having another arrow in my quiver in the fight against the Wizard of Cyberspace and his acolyte, the cursor. ( Picture a paragraph here, please.)

 I experienced a strange happenning after "Bells". A well-meaning friend moved the blogpost to her personal email and edited it. In spite of being one of the people on 'alert- to- a- new-post' list who were warned there was a problem making paragraphs on the newly designed blog site, she told me the post needed paragraphs and broke it up for me, to show me how. As it happens, the breaks she made were more to do with the number of inches and appearance than the sense of what was going on so not at all helpful. There was also a degree of misunderstanding. She assumed my system underlined typos in red. It doesn't, so I have to do some careful proof-reading to deal with mistakes. Clearly, it's not careful enough and she was, as she said, itching to put it right. I felt just as if she had told me my baby's nappy was on upside down and that there was gin in the bottle insead of water. Now, honestly, wouldn't you have felt like that, too? Friendship is about ignoring gin-fed babies - or telling you about it: discuss. As it happens, one of my babies did experience such a mistake. On a boat on a river at a lock, all the adults busy with ropes and engines and what it takes to get a boat through, this two-year-old helped herself to a tall glass of clear fluid standing, momentarily unsupervised - both the glass and the child - on a surface at her eye level. Before you could say "what the H... has she got in her hand?" she had downed the lot: (gin and tonic, of course, with a slice of lemon. What did you imagine?) Dear Reader, she was transformed, there and then, in to a clock-work mouse who did not wind down, I swear, for twenty four hours. Father, brother, baby sister and visiting adult cousin, whose glass it had been, slept the night through. Mother kept vigil while two-year-old buzzed and ricoched around a small river cruiser and finally collapsed in an exhausted heap the next day. No, sit down; it is too late to call Social Services. She is in her forties. None the worse for it unless you want to count rather too great an on-going fondness for the Demon Drink. A word of elucidation for kind readers over the Pond: in UK English, "momentarily" means "for the moment". I understand that in US English, it means "in a moment". When I travelled to the United States with that same child, by then a teen-ager, she was somewhat alarmed to hear the Captain of the flight announce that we would be taking off "momentarily". (See above re paragraph).

 Finally, you should know of one more - were it only one - mistake. My Italian lodger told me he would be going to Italy "next weekend". I forebore to change his bed on the due day, thinking it would be nicer for him to come back to a clean one, forebore to replace the milk for his breakfast cereal and ran out of croissants on the relevant day. I was wrong. "Next weekend" meant the one after the one we were headed for so picture me rushing about looking for a late-opening shop to repair the gaps and provide what was necessary. Maybe I need an editor after all. Nos da
ps The Guru has fixed it!