Let me try to be positive and forward looking this month! School's back this week. This always used to be a cause for celebration by the parents, particularly the housebound mums who had to either avoid tripping over their kids or find things to get them out of the way. At the same time, it used to be a cause for deep gloom for the kids. It may be just the ones that I come across but things appear to have changed. The kids are quite happy, even glad, to be going back to be among their friends again. How lovely, I do hope I'm not mistaken.

One thing I hope will not happen again this month is something that happened to me a few days ago. You may recall I wrote about making a new computer last month as my old one was fast dying on me. Probably the hardest job was transferring all my old software and files, particularly all my photos and videos. I thought I had succeeded and was working with the new computer when I decided it would be nice to start with a tidy machine so I started sorting everything into nice neat folders.

It was then that I found that I had lost a great many of my photos. With a digital camera 'lost' means lost - forever! I panicked and checked my all but dead old machine but there was nothing there. Then I remembered that I occasionally make back up copies on an external hard disk. I checked that and there were the missing photos. And you all know what the moral of that story is!

Finally, I am reading (I am a slow reader) a book about the history of the English language. Many fascinating facts including the fact that at least 6% of the words we use have more than one possible spelling, and that's just in British English (excluding American, African, Indian, Australian, etc. Englishes). However, I still use a spell checker which, at the moment, is telling me it's forgotten all the words I taught it because it has been re-installed. It may soon need to learn a new four letter one!

pete