I have had a very busy day, and it is not over yet.
I am starting to write this whilst sitting in the waiting room at the garage. My taxi is having its tracking fiddled about. Mark said that it needed this because it pulled to the left, but I have been so busy trying to remember about how to get the radio to stop working, disable the stupid automatic windscreen wipers and the ghastly arrangement whereby it turns itself off every time you stop, that I have barely noticed.
After I have finished waiting I will be going shopping, and then onwards to work.
I won’t even get to the shopping until five o’clock.
I thought I would write to you early, although it means you won’t get to hear the edited highlights of Asda, but it does mean that I won’t be so rushed later, and that when I get to the taxi rank I can just sink into an exhausted state of tranquillity and watch the world wagging by.
There are still so many things to be done before that glorious moment that I am trying not to think about them. I am going to be dreadfully late for work.
The day has been filled to bursting already.
The sun is shining, and the washing is flapping nicely in the garden. I have not yet brought it in, that is another chore awaiting my attention later.
We set off early for our fell walk because of having an Appointment.
Today was the day when the chap was coming round to show me how to record a story.
I do not know if I have told you, but I am going to put my Amazon story, being Clive and the Dragon, on Audible. This will mean that even people who are too idle to read, and I am sometimes one of them, can listen to it. It also means that I will have to get my finger out and start arranging advertising for it, but that is a problem for another day.
In order to do this you have got to get it recorded and dispatch it to Audible.
I did not have the smallest intention of getting somebody else to do it. I am a perfectly competent reader, and in any case, somebody else will just do it wrongly. I know what all of the voices sound like inside my head, and somebody else just won’t.
The thing I didn’t know was how to record it.
I used to do sound things in theatres, although it was never my real interest, which was lighting, and in any case we were still in the days of reel-to-reel tapes. Today’s noises are all digital, and that page in my Book of Knowledge was so blank as to be practically see-through.
By great good fortune, one of the taxi drivers used to run a recording studio in his previous incarnation in Hungary, and knows absolutely everything.
He came round this afternoon to lend me a real grown-up microphone and to explain what digital is.
I still don’t really grasp the last bit, but the microphone is very nice.
When I say that he knows everything, I really mean it. He knows everything and then a bit more. I like to think that I am a clever taxi driver, but I am not, not on the scale of things, and he was explaining it all to me in a foreign language as well. He is very clever indeed.
He sat down at my desk, plugged everything in, which was a bit troubling because I did not have any of the right leads and had to ask Oliver, downloaded some things that you download, whatever they are, and then started explaining to me how it worked.
It was harder than a meeting with the accountant.
I was too stupid even to ask stupid questions.
He talked into the microphone and set the levels for my voice. I have got to stay at exactly the right distance from the microphone, which is a different distance if I need to shout for anything. He showed me how to cut and paste words, which I have probably forgotten already, and how to save things so that I will have a story saved on my computer. When I have read it all and then saved it he is going to take it away and run it through some software that will take away any extraneous noises and also the fluffy sounds that people’s mouths make if they talk when they are thirsty.
I was very impressed indeed. Also I was a bit scared. It is really a real thing now. My desk is all set up for reading, and I am going to have to do it.
I am going to read it in the dead of night after work, so that there won’t be any interrupting noises anywhere.
I will let you know how it goes.
When he had gone I noticed that the builders had dumped another massive pile of wood at the back of the house, and so I dashed downstairs and started dragging it into the yard. There was so much that I could not get it all done, and it is waiting for me, along with the washing, for when I get home.
It also made me very grubby just in time for coming into Kendal, I do not look in the least middle-class.
Also I have crossed Sound Engineer off my list of things I want to do when I grow up.
LATER NOTE: The car took ages. I didn’t make it to Asda and I was still late for work.
