The evening before yesterday brought another pleasant surprise in the form of an email which came to me out of the blue. When Meg and I lived down in Hampshire, we lived in a little town called Hedge End and we had bought a house in a Close where there were several young children. Now about three or four doors down, lived a doctor and his wife who was a midwife and whose motto on her car was ‘We help people out’ and they had two children aged 7 and 4 when we first moved there in 1998. The two children came along and introduced themselves and from that point on, the closest possible bond was forged between Meg and I and the two children. The point was that we were the age that their grandparents would have been but their own grandparents lived a long away down in Devon but we were only three or four doors away. So we saw the children nearly every day or nearly every other day and Meg was always there (and I was often there) when they called around. Now the daughter learned from our brother who wrote to us yesterday about Meg’s passing and wrote the most moving and touching message it was possible to receive. In her email, the daughter had written and I quote ‘Any child who is lucky to have a bond like I had with the two of you, is a very lucky child indeed. I hope that knowing how much of an impact Meg had on people’s lives brings you some form of comfort in this time’. Now the daughter will be in her 30’s and works in London (I think) but is going to move heaven and earth to get to the funeral if she possibly can and she can always stay here with me for the night if that should prove necessary. I do hope that we can see her again soon because these two children were actually the nearest thing to grandchildren of our own that it was possible to have and we had so much mutual love for each other. We still have a photograph of the two of them displayed in our lounge but of course it was taken in their pre-adolescent days and now they are very much grown up. I can remember very vividly our very first encounter with the children because the older brother had brought his younger sister along with him when he came to introduce himself. He told us his name and announced that ‘This is my younger sister, ——‘ The little girl stamped her foot and exclaimed ‘I am not his little sister. I was last year when I was three but now I am four!’ I have replied to her email to me, expressing the hope she can attend the funeral but if she can’t make it she could always perhaps pop along and spent a weekend here when we can exchange pleasant memories. I have asked her permission if, like her brother’s email, I can quote much of it in a Tributes section of the website I am dedicating to Meg. Whilst on the subject of writing a website, I have discovered during the night how I only to have add a two word instruction and a numeric parameter to the CSS in my HTML code, in which the page is written, to turn my navigation buttons into much more aesthetically pleasing buttons with rounded edges which improves their appearance no end. Although I have several books on HTML and CSS, I find I can get the answer more quickly by consulting the web rather than looking for it in a book.
As it turned out, yesterday was a very different type of day. My normal Pilates class was cancelled because the tutor is taking a half-term break and so I knew that I had a lot of the morning free. So I devoted to a lot of time hunting through my hard disk folders to locate photos of Meg which we can use in an ‘Celebration of Life’ presentation. This was quite a challenging and time consuming task if only because I have my photos split over a selection of folders which are named according to the holiday location or the year or the event such as anniversary. Even when I located a photo it was not always suitable if it was taken in a dark restaurant or with a crowd of people where Meg appeared marginal. As it was, the photos that I did find and select always seemed to be with me (as I used to get someone else to take the photo) and generally displayed Meg with a glass of wine in her hand or nearby, so that it appears that we led the most dissolute of lives. Most of the photos I have located are what might be termed ‘holiday snaps’ and I did tend to snap locations rather than people but I did end up with nearly fifty. I chose those photos that showed us at either family events or with our close friends which is fitting, I feel, for a display of this type. Locating the photos is I think one task but getting them into a ‘rolling display’ is another thing. I do have a large A4 book in which I write down computing tips and techniques and was soon able to discover what I had done nearly eight years ago when I had unearthed some software which gave a rolling display of our original wedding photos back in 1967 and which I utilised on the occasion of our 50th anniversary which was nearly eight years ago now. But I did manage to adapt this software as ‘all’ I had to do was to replace the approximately one dozen photos of our wedding with nearly four times that number now. This task absorbed me all of the morning and I worked on it practically non-stop apart from a brief break to go and collect my newspaper. The only way to make sure that everything worked was to play it through which at 5 seconds per photo took four minutes for a complete tun through. Incidentally, I have a huge ‘mp3’ file of all of the wedding music we had played in 1967 and I have this playing in the background. The first track is the well known organ piece by J. S. Bach ‘Wachet Auf’ or ‘Sleepers Awake’ which is highly appropriate for several reasons. Firstly, we chose it as the track to which Meg walked down the aisle (or should it be the knave?) in 1967 and which our Eucharistic minister (and organist) is actually going to play for us when we start off proceedings on June 11th. It is one of our favourite pieces of music and many people will know it as the ‘Lloyds Bank’ music when they used it for the advert featuring a black horse several years ago. The music is not synchronised to the photos but when one accesses the website containing the rolling display and the music, you get the music playing in one tab and start off the display with another tab. Well, all I can say is that it works!
Just after lunch, my son called around and he is much more familiar than am I with a piece of photo manipulation software which goes by the unfortunate name of ‘SmugMug’ but which is actually excellent and we both have a subscription to it. My son is much more familiar with it but he achieved a degree of presentation with it which is much more professional than my efforts in HTML and which can be easily augmented and reorganised as new photos come to light, which they are doing.