Weather beaten but not yet broken

WHILE the title of this page promises articles on the outdoors, these articles generally have to be written indoors. For almost the entire month of May 2006, it was certainly far too wet to sit under an umbrella on the lawn, with driving rain swamping the computer keyboard.

On one such day, I braved the elements only to return soaked, with my wife’s phone drowned beyond hope of resuscitation.

Someone asked me how I usually prepare my articles and send them to the Examiner, a question often asked. Unable to write about nature, I decided I’d write about writing about nature.

Regarding the sending: once, I sent them by mail, then, by Echo van, as it passed. Then, I phoned them in. Then fax arrived. Now I send them by email — but we still don’t have broadband here, which is a disgrace! I use an Apple computer. Had I a technologist sitting here before me, I would tell him it is high time two extra keys were added to keyboards, one to print the word “the”, and the other to print the word “and”.

I have worn countless layers of skin off my two typing fingers, belting out these words over the years. I counted the number of “the’s” that appeared in my article last week on human breast milk. The word appeared 56 times. Instead of a mere 56 keystrokes, I had to hit the keys 168 times (and given my many misses, probably 200 in all!)

However, nowadays, doing so is not as sanity-threatening as before.

Prior to the arrival of Correction Fluid, one had to use an eraser. While sympathetic newspaper editors would overlook the odd hole in a typescript, job application letters looking like off-cuts from string vests did not impress.

Once Correction Fluid was invented, one could whiten out errors and type over them. But if a word was left out there was often no solution but to retype the entire page.

Then, photocopying came along. Now, if a word was omitted, the paragraph could be re-typed correctly on another sheet, then cut out and stuck over the original with a glue stick (these had also arrived). The whole page, after photocopying, would appear as good as new. With cosmetic expertise, the seams around the new paragraph wouldn’t show.

Hard-chaw reporters became as adept with Tipex as ballerinas with eye-liners.

However, the real trouble arose if adding the omitted word to the paragraph resulted in the new paragraph lengthening by a line. Then, the paragraph beneath it had to move down, and so on, paragraph after paragraph, to the end of the page. And possibly onto the next page, as well.

The hapless author or sub-editor would then find himself surrounded by clipped-out sections of typescript, which he somehow often contrived to join up in the wrong order. This resulted in an article which might have been written by the proverbial monkey at a typewriter (which, perhaps, one’s kind readers thought was the case anyway, whether or not scissors and glue had been employed).

In time, the typewriter was, happily, replaced by the computer, and now one can correct mistakes before they ever appear in print. The spell-checker will do everything, but must be invigilated with an eagle eye.

A friend once typed up an advert announcing a “beautiful blue Volvo for sale”. She was about to send it, with her telephone number, to a respectable newspaper when she noticed that the spell-checker had substituted Vulva for Volvo, this being the nearest-equivalent word the thing knew!

Meanwhile, when computers reverse roles and deliver messages to the user, one wonders if the monkey at the typewriter isn’t alive and well inside. Recently, when the Aer Lingus website failed to open, I got a helpful message to clarify the situation. This read, “None of the range-specifier values in the Range request-header field overlap the current extent of the selected resource.” What a relief!