Wednesday 17th August
And a strange quiescent mood has settled on me. I got quite animated writing about Aunt Maud’s house, it brought back with it so many memories I thought I really had consigned to bed ages ago. And also memories of Grandma; Grandma as she used to be, before she got old and crotchety, before we fell out – well, drifted apart really, as there was no falling out at all. Well, not until the end, until we were so far apart, that, as Humpty-Dumpty found out, there was no putting us together again. Grandma used to even be fun at one time, quite jolly when I was a little girl, despite, what I had no real understanding of at the time, our slightly straightened circumstances. She was always pleased to see me when I would come home from school; always interested in me, intrigued to find out how school had been, what I had learned. And I would tell her everything, all about this or that teacher, or about Jennie and her perfect looks, or chubby little Gwennie and her boyish ways. And we would sit and she would help me with my homework, or what passed for it back then. Not that she was that much help really, but she would always correct my English grammar, and was bright as a button when it came to maths. Right to the end she could do mental arithmetic far faster than most people. Nowadays even I have gotten used to using a calculator, and even back in my hotel days working in Accounts we had adding machines, with rows of digits you had to press, and a big handle you pulled down and the machine would whirr and clunk and the answer would be printed out on a two inch wide ribbon of paper. Oh what a godsend those machines were when you had a hundred entries to add up in a ledger, because this was way before computers and Excel spreadsheets were in common usage. A computer was unheard of, we had seen them on the television and they were the size of a room, with big spools of tape that spun around as the mighty machine did its thing. Exactly what it was doing nobody seemed to know, of course, but in awed silence we were mightily impressed. And now they are everywhere, in every little gadget, in every household appliance, and even the delivery man, who has just delivered my latest book from Amazon has a handheld computer which I am even supposed to sign with a little plastic stick on the two inch wide screen. Quite amazing; one wonders where it will all end.