that was then.....this is now

(for S.)

id been fretting about starting a blog for about 2 years having gone from the sort of luddite resistance of some,i guess,in particular of my generation to an enthusiast of the idea,that left me eager to get going but with a level of technical incompetence that left me getting nowhere.

i did make some effort.but what those who are computer literate take for granted has to be spelt out to the letter for someone like me.indeed what drives me absolutely nuts is how very often in my experience,even tutors leave out steps which completey sabotages the efforts of someone like me.it seems children learn fast because they dont follow the rules but play and get there by a speeded up version of trial and error.all i ever got in formal comuter training was a version of"dont worry your pretty little head about that"(i write it in its sexist version to make my point).playing with the computer can result in mistakes for adults like me-and mistakes cost you your job!it also drives me nuts when i folow instructions and what comes u in front of me is NOT whats in the instructions or the manual,nor indeed does i bear any relationship to it.there is NEVER any guidance as to what to do next.what is described as on the bottom of a left hand column is never there.o no you have to do something else thats not in the instructions and where the toolto do it with is compketely obscure or obscured.

that said i  did have some help from friend who did everything they could from a distance or in the circumstances we were in.

meantime,i got so frustrated that i started a blog  on friends reunited.this did not meet all my hunger but it gave me a start.until that site revamed itself,not to meet the wishes of users who i can only hazard at a guess were using the site to make contact with old and often lost friends,and then to keep in touch with them and organise things like reunions.

i wrote on that nearly every days for many months.lots of the material were reminiscences and memories about music or socialist politics.three things happenned when the site got revamped.

friends were reduced to contacts and the information collected or that could potentially collected was reduced to the minimal and incomprehensible.so if you have a friend caled say ahmed muhammed or john smith there is  no possibiility of trackin them down now.a search of paper telephone directories is more likely to produce a result.

when i recently attended a reunion,in which i was intentonally somewhat out of place,the friends who had organised it had abandoned friends reunited as an organising too.

thirdly and most personally-the site now makes great claims about placing,keeping and  storing memories safely and permanently.i assume PROMISE is spelt b****x,because i can nether work out how to make it work,nor save antyhing i might cal my own-it all seems to be there and at a price(and frankly it makes me so angry i no longer care whether my perception is accurate,so dont waste your time telling me).they are more interested in whether i/we remember events involving the family of leading parasites,than my own memories.and they were perfectly happy to just dump all my material.

but then i got lucky.i got very lucky.very lucky indeed.

i went to apublic meeting about someting else entirely-i mean NOT anything to do with computers in any way,except in a discussion about using computer technologies there was at least one person in the room who knew what they were talking about.i noticed....across the room,we had an exchange about "self activity".i noticed.

we seemed to be talking the same language-about the campaign.i noticed.as for computers i was lost except in trying to undertand what we were being told,to my surprise i did understand,though looking back i regret that some of the exchange was typically sexist(me)-in hearing a woman speak and then reinterpreting,except is was soe of us men(me certainly)being dense-not our comrade.

when the meeting broke up,we did what"lefties"typicall do and went to the pub.but then"its(always)good to talk"and much of it was networking and organising-the detailed stuff that turns good intent into real concrete activity,without which it is all dreams and easted good intentions.my comrade and myself quickly found ourselves deep in conversation about marxist books and reading.and no-one ticked me off for not making small talk!

when we met asecond time to talk books and theory,we went on to arrange to meet to set up my blog.we did subsequently and i could not believe(I DO,but you know what i mean) that within 20 minutes(not even the 30 minutes she committed to)i had my blog.

the fate of the rest is i guess in my hands.its not very sophisticated yet-but thats about me,and that indeed i want to make learning how to do it properly,part of the process and outcome.but its very much my friends efforts that got me here.she may not think its much,amongst all the material in her intellectual and practical abilities but its important for me.

and i have comradeship and friendship too

what more could i ask for?

so,that was then and this is now.

from here,i want to collect the material ive scatterred over the internet.,i want to bring together most if not al the interests that make up at least part of who i am(or who i think i am).i wont pretend that it will ever be a seamless"garment",nor that interests fit tgether neatly-life is not like that.in addition i hope to recover and reconstruct the material i have  already lost to friends reunited or in certain other sorts of"breakdown".

as they say"that was then...this is now!"

(for S)