talk in Chelmsford

I drove to Chelmsford today to do a woodland charity talk.  It is slightly mad to have someone clogging up the roads driving from north Essex to Chelmsford to bang the drum for environmental conservation, but they don't have a volunteer based in the middle of the county.  They did have somebody a few years back, but he found his working hours became unpredictable and he couldn't combine work with volunteering.  I once stepped in to cover one of his gigs at Hatfield Peveril at extremely short notice, a fact to which the organisation saved from having a meeting without a speaker were totally oblivious, and so completely ungrateful.

Today's group were perfectly pleasant, and the talk went fine, apart from a heart-stopping moment before the start.  I'd got the digital projector set up, and done my best to level the image by twiddling the legs under the machine, trying to work out how much of my problem was that the screen is wonky after years of use and makes the picture look off-kilter when it isn't, and to what extent the issue was that the floor wasn't level.  The picture looked about right, or at least as good as I was going to get it, I put the remote control down on the projector stand, and the power cut out.  Suddenly there was not merely no image, but no green light on the projector.  My host said he hadn't switched anything off, so I didn't know if it was a momentary power interruption, or if my equipment had broken.  The remote requires you to press the off button twice before the machine will power down, to save you from accidentally switching it off if you press 'Off' once by mistake while talking, so I knew I hadn't turned it off.

The digital projector takes several seconds either to power up or power down, so once you have tried anything you need to give it time to work.  I tried pressing the on-off button once, and the red light on the back of the machine began to flash, which normally means it is powering down.  My host began to flap around me, trying to be helpful, and looked alarmingly as though he were going to experimentally unplug the machine.  My cry of 'please don't touch that' had more than a touch of squeak about it.  The machine went through a phase of bringing up the slide menu, but refusing to go into the first slide, claiming not to be able to detect an input, then settled down and worked for the rest of the afternoon.  At times like that I still find the digital projector un-nerving, even after years of using it, because I know that if it goes off-script and does something I am totally not expecting, it is only a small and stupid computer and I am not good with computers, so my chances of getting it to work are slim.  Especially when I have an anxious pensioner fussing around me who knows even less about digital projectors than I do, and a compilation of popular songs of the twentieth century playing rather too loudly in the background.  (I find background music hampers thought, and always have to switch off the radio for tricky bits of navigation in the car.  I don't understand all those people who call Classic FM with their requests and say they are at work, or worse still, finishing a thesis or revising for exams.)

On the journey home I got cut up by a van and a four wheel drive on my way back to the A12, and then ground to a halt around Hatfield Peveril, which turned out to be due to a jackknifed lorry blocking one lane at Rivenhall.  The lorry had demolished a lampost before coming to rest with the cab at ninety degrees to the road jammed into a large bush, and the trailer across one carriageway, but the glass of the cab was intact and I shouldn't think the driver was seriously hurt.  It was a perfectly nice day by then, not raining, decent visibility.  Goodness knows how anybody manages to jacknife a lorry in those conditions, but they ought to be prosecuted for causing a nuisance.  There are some evil potholes in that part of the A12, which I was able to study in detail at my leisure as we crawled along.  They need filling in before the next traffic jam is caused by a motorcyclist sticking their front wheel down one and killing themselves.

When I got home (eventually) I discovered that all four little hens had come out of the chicken house, and been scratching around the straw bale in the run while the rooster stood on top of it with a horrified expression, like somebody standing on a chair to escape from mice.  He'll like them when they're older.

Addendum  BT refused to admit that the reason why our broadband capacity falls off a cliff in the evenings is because they don't provide enough capacity for the number of customers using the line then, and said we must have a new home hub.  The Systems Administrator fitted it, and we discovered that our wireless printers would no longer work.  Seems the new home hub can't support them.  I now have a too-short USB cable strung across my desk as an emergency measure.  Good old BT.