The rain is back. There was no off-road venturing this morning. As I dripped round the ford ampersand, I sought comfort in the expectation that I would return with ‘that Brylcreem look’ which would resolve my bad hair day. I had awoken with it sticking out all over the place. Johnny Rotten would have been proud of it.
Able Piling’s crew, who were, with shovels and spades, laying stones in a drive, didn’t welcome the rain. 
They sensibly kept their heads covered.
The work of post-winter clearing of the ditches had begun. This involves digging out mud and debris which is then heaped by the side of the trenches. No doubt it finds its own level and is soon covered in greenery. I do hope this is now done by machines. I expect I will find out. Interestingly, if the ditch is alongside your property its maintenance is your responsibility.
The coned off pool described in, among others, the post of 17th December last year, has now been resurfaced and its drain cleared.
Champion (see 16th December) has his cough back.
Jackie drove us to Southampton Parkway to collect Alison who came for a visit. Leaked petrol glowed iridescently on the wet forecourt of the garage at Eastleigh where she filled the tank.
Later I applied my mind to iMacs. First I had to use an ordinary memory stick on which Elizabeth had collected the photographs of ‘Derrick through the ages’, that were a background slideshow at my 70th birthday party. This I had attached to my ‘veteran’ iMac, but hadn’t tried to save it. Given that I had bought a My Passport for Mac with which to transfer all the pictures from old to new computer, I thought I would initially attempt to put Elizabeth’s set into the pictures section of the old one. Miraculously I managed it.
The next task was to transfer the now enhanced collection of saved photos from my six year old redundant Mac. So the first box I opened was the My Passport for Mac. It carried a guarantee in goodness knows how many languages, but the directions consisted of a scanty sheet of paper with three pictures, numbered 1,2,and 3. I couldn’t make head or tail of them, except that I should first plug it into a USB port. So I did that, clicked onto the icon and stared at stuff. After much trial and error, I eventually clicked and dragged the Pictures icon to the My Passport one. Then we had lift-off. Perhaps the most scary bit was the message informing me this would take about two hours. So, in order not to spend that time hovering over a screen watching a thin blue line creeping across it and a white light flashing on the super duper memory stick, I sidled across the room to my laptop and played an on-line Scrabble session. After two hours I had a look. It was done. Ejecting the My Passport safely was problematic. I kept getting a message telling me it was in use and therefore couldn’t be ejected. So I shut down the computer, switched it on again and had no problem. Thanks to ‘The It Crowd’ for that little tip. I think I’ll open the new iMac box tomorrow. I don’t want to push my luck. 
But just to show you that I can at least transfer the contents of a memory stick to my soon to be obsolete iMac, here is a picture of Derrick from 1942.
Anyone under the age of five reading this, please understand that I’m an old man. You are probably already familiar with all this. If you are not there already, when you get to school it will be how you communicate and learn. When I went to school even biros had only just been invented. We didn’t yet have them, and dipped a pen with a steel nib into a dark liquid called ink with which to write on paper.
I felt I’d earned the wonderful chicken jalfrezi with homemade chutneys that Jackie served up for our evening meal. Bread and Butter pudding was my choice of afters. Hers was rhubarb crumble. I finished the Isla Negra whilst Jackie abstained. Don’t get the wrong idea, I would have given her some had she wanted it.
Today’s title comes from a classic self-help book by Susan Jeffers, first published in 1987. I’ve never read the book, but the title has always appealed to me.