Names

I was looking forward to a quiet day on Thursday. I had nothing in my diary, nothing planned until going put to see friends in the evening. That all changed with a phone call on Wednesday evening.

It was from one of my other friends who is very involved in the various activities leading up to the Remembrance commemorations in Cumbernauld Village. One of these is a booklet giving more details of each of the 61 men who fell in the 1914-18 conflict and whose names are listed on the Village War Memorial.

"I need your help," she said. All the research had been done, all the details had been typed up on A4 pages in landscape mode, two columns per page, 34 pages in total (68 pages when folded into an A5 booklet format). The only problem was that this did not result in a proper A5 booklet when folded. And it's not double-sided.
Er, no it won't if pages 1 & 2 are on one sheet, pages 3 & 4 are on the next sheet and so on. "Is there anything you can do to fix it, if I pop by with the USB drive?"

And so, dear reader, that's how I spent a considerable part of Thursday: copying and pasting the details of 61 of our fallen into a document format that would 'work' when printed as an A5 booklet. When it came to actually printing the thing, of course, I had the occasional printer jam, ran out of ink on one occasion, and all the usual stuff. All I have is a cheap domestic printer, not quite up to the task, but I soldiered on (pun intended) reminding myself through gritted teeth that my travails were nothing compared to those described on the printed pages. And, unlike those poor souls, I lived to tell this tale.

All I lost was one day. For me there's always tomorrow.