I have finally upgraded my website, as you have probably noticed.
I have become slick, streamlined and user-friendly.
I think I have worked out what a SEO might be, and I think I have now written something in the CSS. It might be that when you click on the button that says: ‘subscribe’, you will now get this page emailed to you every morning. You might not, as well, as I do not have the technical savoir-faire to test run it and discover whether or not it works. I shall have to wait until somebody subscribes, and then ask them. If you have subscribed, kindly let me know what, if anything, actually happens. I signed my own e-mail address up, but it doesn’t do anything until four o’clock in the morning, when it gets up and starts writing to people whilst they are asleep, so I shall have to wait.
It has taken me almost all day, with occasional interludes of washing and feeding pizza to the children. I felt guilty about this, because we have run out of mayonnaise, and the blackcurrants are sitting in a pan on the stove, ready stewed and strained, and ready to be turned into jelly and jam. If I had been a properly responsible housewife I would have done these things, because the children have been eating pizza for four days now, and they need some mayonnaise and jam to balance things out.
Anyway, I didn’t. I opened the office window as wide as it would go, because it has stopped raining today, and retreated in front of the computer with a large quantity of tea.
It is really difficult for an old person to make sense of computers. They are so spectacularly clever, and it is possible to make them do almost completely everything.
This makes it very hard to narrow them down to just doing the simple thing that I want.
Lucy came to help.
She was very patient, but in the end had to go away, because she said that I poke the keyboard far harder than a modern person needs to, and that the resulting clattery sound is an upsetting noise. She said that a mere touch is sufficient, and that I am an oaf in clumsy possession of a delicate piece of fine technology.
Of course my very first keyboard, when I first started trying to write stories, was a large black cast iron affair, with a ribbon that would come adrift and get tangled and need re-rolling. I could never afford to replace the ribbon out of my pocket money, and the wonderful modern Amazon tradition, when young people just click on their parents’ credit cards and stuff arrives in the post the next morning, was not yet upon us, and my stories became fainter and fainter as they approached the denouement.
Hence I acquired the habit of bashing the keys really hard, in order to maximise the remaining ink. This is now un-necessary, of course, because of the absence of anything so primitive as ink in the new millennium, but it has proved almost impossible to shake. Indeed, I wore all of the letters completely off my very first actual computer keyboard and had to type from memory.
All the same, Lucy’s help turned out to be invaluable. I am now signed up for something called Tumblr, and something else called Twitter. I do not know what I should do with either of these things, but apparently they are a vital marketing tool for people with websites, so it is a good job I have got a teenager in the house. She has also dispatched my story, which you will now find included as a page on here, off to people called Beta readers, in order that they can tell me what they think.
I was still squinting at it all and sighing occasionally when Mark came home from work, and the Number Two Daughters from their day out. They had been to Ambleside Show, and had bought some charcoal flavoured cheese as a present. This turned out to be really very nice. Mark created something similar when he forgot about the pizza for dinner, but his was not nearly as splendid.
We roused the dogs and went for a walk up the fell side in the end, because I needed to clear my head, and Mark needed not to be feeling hot and grumpy about work. This must have been good for us, because we puffed and panted a great deal, and both felt a bit pink and light-headed when we got to the top. Then unexpectedly it turned out to have been a brilliant idea, because the sun was setting and the world was bathed in glorious colours. There is a picture is at the top of the page. I have not done anything improving to it, because even if it had needed it, I have not yet achieved that level of technical competence.
It really looked like that.
