The Wine Widow on tech
There is a pool of water in the footwell of the passenger seat and another in the footwell behind that. They have been there for so long that mould is growing up the back of the seat and when driving it, one has a sense an unhealthy level of spores invading the respiratory system. The garage diagnosed a leaking windscreen, which is in fact a newish windscreen. I have received this information and done precisely nothing with it although when the sun came out last week I opened the car doors in a vague attempt to dry it out. I am not, as is often pointed out, a practical person.
Nor do I have any understanding or interest in what might loosely be termed IT which includes switching t.v. channels. Zam on the other hand is both practical and rather proud of his technical skills and whilst I don’t mind the sighs as I pick up the wrong t.v. handset again it is not without a little bit of schadenfreude that I witnessed his part in an email debacle. I think it would be unwise to revisit this in detail, suffice to say that following his avowed understanding of MailChimp, a lot of people got a lot of emails and some people got none at all.
Who got what is still a mystery and the last time I said “But I still don’t understand why you sent….” He looked up and said “Please go away.” I think it’s to do with two-finger scrolling but then I’m not a practical person.
A few days later he gave a talk in our local pub. Historically, Zam loathes public speaking, partly because of anxiety and partly because he always cries. His anxiety stems from a traumatic schoolboy event when he had to recite a poem to his peers which he hadn’t learnt. On drying up somewhere in the second verse of The Wild Swans at Coole, he was hauled off stage and still shudders at the memory. The crying… well things just set him off. He can’t watch an ice skater performing a triple axel or The Repair Shop without tears rolling down his cheeks.
But he returned from the pub very buoyed up and jubilant. “It’s the oddest thing” he said, “but ever since I’ve been talking about the vineyard in public I find I can do it quite easily, without notes or fear… in fact I love it. I can do it for hours.”
And on this, I can truly say, we have no disagreement whatsoever.
