Jacquetta

Contrary to what many folk think I'm not actually interested in computers, only in what they empower you to do. (I programmed my first mainframe computer over 45 years ago.) I seldom upgrade unless forced to, and I am still devoted to my eerily silent Apple Cube despite its great age (virtually "last century"). Above all, I am still running not only my business but also all domestic, personal, family and other contacts using a wonderful HyperCard stack that my guru Bob Tennent and I developed in 1989! HyperCard was fast, friendly, flexible and (perhaps fatally) free. It was easy to adapt to developing needs and I simply can't imagine life without it.

Sadly, although Apple has kept faith with its legacy users who can run HyperCard in a window under the obsolete OS9, successive upgrades have been less and less compatible with keeping my wonder stack updated, and no new Mac can run it at all. My Cube is groaning under its workload and has slowed to a point where I notice delays. I saw this coming, and actually bought HyperCard's modern descendant SuperCard a few years ago. And then I postponed and procrastinated ... SuperCard is fundamentally different, a more powerful piece of software, slightly scary. Despite being about 95% compatible with HyperCard, I was worried about the other 5%. Normally 95% of a programmer's effort goes into fixing the last 5%. No longer a spring chicken, I funked the idea of having my life and my business paralysed by inability to debug unfamiliar code. It was, after all, nearly 20 years since I had been competent at HyperTalk coding ... and my LaserWriter which also dates from that era is still going strong!

Fortunately, SuperCard has three enormous assets, beyond the fact that it works with modern Macs. First is a HyperCard conversion utility which (to my enormous relief) took my stack (now with nearly 9000 records) and converted it into a 95% usable SuperCard project. Second, there's a wonderful user group where my "seeking help" message (concerned with the other 5%) has already provided 47 response messages from SuperCard developers who are really generous with their time and expertise. Third is John Johnston, user group member and teacher at Sandaig Primary School in Easterhouse, Glasgow. He has already helped me loads by email, and I haven't even met him yet. Look at the pupils' blogs, podcasts and projects on his school's amazing website. The result is that despite a hair-raising week since I converted, some scary "Bad Star" messages and a lot of messing with code (SuperTalk, AppleScript et al), I now have a working project which is very nearly as useful as the previous stack and not all that much slower.

Whilst I appreciate Danny Goodman's altruism in insisting that HyperCard be free of charge, had it been sold even at a sensible price, I bet it would still be alive and well and available on modern Macs, thereby saving all of us who loved it the pain of switching to SuperCard. Just a thought about market forces.

I've just had a jaw-dropping experience: looking out of the window, I saw an otter ... a large, sleek, dog otter. It was only about 10 yards from the house, running across our driveway, where it met a fence and crossed again – in which instant I managed to attract Keir's attention so he saw it too. We haven't seen it since, but think he must have trotted in through the front gate, and presumably that's the only way he can leave because of our perimeter fence. Otters are my favourite creatures, and previously I've seen them in the wild only from a distance, and only twice before in Scotland (on the River Endrick and on Arran). So I was astounded to find one visiting our garden.

Landrick has the most amazing wildlife. We have a resident heron, known as Harry, who thrives on the fish in the pond, but also sometimes takes frogs and field mice. Roe deer are frequent visitors to the garden: unlike the otter they can easily jump the fence. We see brown hare and buzzard often, and stoat occasionally. We have had oystercatchers nesting in the garden, this year successfully thanks to my improvised shelter which kept the crows off. And a mute swan dropped in for a few days last year.

This year, unlike last when 12 ducklings all perished in their first few days, the ducklings have been a huge success: they were launched later, at the very end of June (instead of April) and their mother has been a total control freak, keeping them close and protecting them overnight by letting all 10 huddle beneath her. While out of line with infant-centred views about little ones choosing for themselves, this has the enormous advantage of having kept the little darlings alive. I wholly approve of this feisty mama, especially when she attacked me (I had picked up a duckling to let grand-daughter Amy stroke its superb down).

For weeks, I didn't even dare blog about them, in case I was tempting Providence, but now they are six weeks old and fledging, they are viable and have as good a chance as any. So here is our feisty mama, leading her offspring in closely controlled formation, with a larger close-up beneath: gorgeous or what?

I’m delighted to report that the dust has settled on my computer upgrade, and I’m back to using the machine as a tool rather than diverting energy into installing software, troubleshooting and choosing hardware. My SuperCard project is running sweetly on the new iMac and although it doesn’t try to exploit most of the new SC features, it does the job smoothly, and I can expand its functionality as I go along. And I have never seen photographs look as stunning as on its glossy 24-inch screen.

The problem with using my ancient laser printer was looking intractable with System 10.5 (Leopard), possibly related to its AppleTalk connection. Having swapped it with the new Epson printer (which I had given to husband Keir, see blog entry of 21.11.2007) for diagnostic purposes, I had the happy idea of making the swap permanent. Since husband Keir is not about to upgrade from 10.4 any time soon, Leopard gives me a good reason to retrieve the better printer! How ironic that a piece of machinery which has given 19 years' reliable service is now on borrowed time for reasons of software "progress"!

The AppleWorks problem has been solved, also in an unorthodox way. My own, legally purchased and upgraded AppleWorks CD had refused point-blank to instal under Leopard. Considering that all our invoices and many book manuscripts are in Appleworks, this was a major setback. The solution was a kind friend who emailed me his AppleWorks to try. Despite having the same version number (6.2.9) as mine, this one works a treat under Leopard. So all my recent concern about Microsoft Office 2008 and downloading a trial version of iWorks Pages was needless. I realise AppleWorks is no longer maintained, but feel I’ve done enough innovating recently and my motto remains “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.”. The time to change word processing systems is not now.

It’s lucky that the PowerBook keyboard is near-silent, because I’m typing this in the same room that grand-daughter Amy is sleeping. She has had an exciting day, with no nap, lots of exercise, games with two large black Labradors, sociability and a swim. She wore the Polyotter today, a swimsuit with removable body floats, and it was her longest, and most independent swim so far. Then we visited neighbours and dear friends Malcolm and Aileen, which was a brilliant distraction from the fact that her mother was going out for the evening for a well-deserved break and her grand-father Keir was going to Glasgow for a concert to celebrate Nigel Osborne’s 60th birthday. We walked back up the hill in near-darkness (Amy in the buggy by now) and had the loveliest bath with bubbles. Before I had finished reading Jill Lambert’s wonderful “Peace at last” to her, she was already asleep.

Much as I would like to have gone to Nigel’s concert, fielding Amy was more compelling. (I’ve just found out that it will be broadcast by the BBC on Saturday 25 October, 22.30 to midnight, which is great news as he sang a cameo role in one of the opera selections and I’ve never heard Nigel sing before.) I feel absurdly proud of Amy’s water confidence, and her insistence ‘I can do it by myself’. This is approximately true when she’s wearing the Polyotter but doomed to failure when, as so often, she asks to come back in the water, after I had thought she was finished, without a stitch on. But she will get there, as long as she goes on enjoying it. She has the most wonderful social confidence, a real tribute to her mother’s patience and child-centredness. But she fell asleep before 8.30 pm and I needed to occupy myself for the evening.

Real work is now out of the question: the office is too far away to be in earshot, and neither music nor TV are compatible with monitoring her welfare. So this is the ideal moment to update my blog, which at least has proved useful to me when I forget things (which has become increasingly often lately). I’m wildly unreliable about update frequency but have decided just to accept my own faults and forgive them. If I blogged about some of the exciting things I’ve done recently, I might never be able to make myself write the book. My time in June on Kili by the Lemosho route is an example: I just have to keep my powder dry or the book would never be written.

The winter solstice is our turning-point in morale, when we look forward to more daylight and make fresh plans. Presumably it was the pre-Christian reason for celebrating late December, and it's good timing for those of us who live at high latitude. I realise the solstice was actually yesterday, but it was today before the irresistible beauty of Landrick in the snow made me stop work, look around and finally take the camera into the garden. Even the pampas grass looks good rimed with snow, and the frozen pond and trees seem quietly to embrace the house.

Most beautiful of all is our mature birch tree: surprisingly spreading and shapely for a birch it has new serenity with its dusting of snow. It seems a particularly suitable image for the optimism I feel whenever we "turn the corner".

This photo evokes a period of four weeks in which Landrick has been effectively cut off by snow. In 17 years of living here, we'd never thought of chains before, having coped by leaving a car at the foot of the hill and hiking the last bit. After over two weeks, this was beginning to pall and we opted for Klack & Go which are self-tensioning and supposed to be easy to fit. This isn't as simple as the girl in the video makes it look! We even wondered if they would be too late to be useful. Not a bit: in the last fortnight, they have repaid their cost by letting us give lifts to people and boxes of books. As a publisher, we still have to get orders out to customers, which means meeting delivery drivers at the foot of the hill.

A compensation of the snow has been the view from the office window: snow becomes Landrick well, and our pond is a natural skating rink:

Wednesday brought a phone call from The Bookseller to ask if Rucksack Readers had been affected by the weather at all? So I told them about the snow chains and the view from the office window and was astonished to find myself quoted on page 3 of Friday's issue.

Yesterday the thaw arrived in earnest, and we removed the chains (much easier than fitting them). Our colour-starved eyes are feasting on greens and browns, the postie has resumed delivering our mail and life may be returning to normal. Perhaps washing and putting away the chains will become a feature of Januaries to come, like taking down the Christmas tree and packing up the lights.