I’m back from my trip around the UK. We drove over 850 miles with few hold-ups on the roads. I saw my wonderful Aunty Betty, which was great. She has been very seriously ill in hospital because she stopped eating and couldn’t even walk. Now she is making an excellent recovery. I took her 4 of her favourite cream cakes, a plant and a big box of chocolates. She ate 2 of the cakes when and I was there and she made me have one and on the phone today she told me she had the last one late that night and she has also finished the whole box of chocolates. That’s excellent news.
I went to Abbotsholme for the pre-course meeting I have to have before all courses. This meeting was with the bursar, John, Rachel the head cook and John who I think is the person in charge of all of the buildings. They are all very nice people. The meeting didn’t take too long as most things are repeated each year. I had a quick tour of the building to see the changes that have been made – mainly bathroom upgrades this year. So now I’ve just got to wait for everyone returning their forms and then I can do all the final bookings and planning. The pre-course meetings are important to try and reduce any problems we might have during the course – and sometimes we have problems!
I came home to loads of post, emails and phone messages. I’ve been trying to sort those out today, but I’ve lots left for tomorrow. I’ve also got to do the Ian Anderson/Jethro Tull draw before I go to bed and email Ian the details of the lucky people who will be going along to Cardiff and Birmingham. That’s a nice job making people happy. I talked with Zoe the photographer (Ellie’s Mum) on the phone tonight and I think I made her happy about her taking photos of Ian Anderson in Birmingham.
Talking of Zoe’s photos the magazine is out for all UK members. Europe and the rest of the world will go out on Monday. Have you got yours? What do you think? Do you like the cover? Do you like Zoe’s photos? Do you like the articles? Let me know.
The Spring magazine is finished, Robin brought copies around today. He collected the address sheets – which didn’t take me as long to do as usual, as Andy set up address sheets on the database so I could just print them out direct. So today and tomorrow Robin is packing them and on Wednesday the postman will collect them from the print works and your magazine should eventually reach you on Thursday or Friday. It really is such a long process.
I hope you enjoy it when it arrives. Please let me know. We are pleased with it. The cover is great and we are happy with how the whole thing looks. Zoe’s photos are good.
I’m disappearing for a few days. I’ve got to visit my Aunty Betty who has been a bit ill recently (everyone should have an Aunty Betty, mine is wonderful) and I’ve also got a pre-course meeting at Abbotsholme.
Go on, leave me a few messages for when I get back.
When we were up seeing James the other day (when we bought our Mac Pro), we got talking about the early days of Flutewise. James suggested a reunion of all those members who used to come to Corsica Hall*. It would be great to catch up with so many people and find out what they are doing now. Let me know if you are one of those people and like the idea of a weekend in sunny Brighton sometime soon.
*Corsica Hall was the building in Seaford, Sussex that we used for many years to hold residential courses. It was a fabulous, friendly building – even the ghosts were friendly. It did have problems – we couldn’t drink the water from the taps in the bedrooms because of the pigeons in the water tank; the bedroom walls were paper-thin and we heard many, many fascinating converstaions at night; the whole place was like a rabbit warren – but it had a wonderful atmosphere. When the owners, East Sussex County Council, decide to sell it many of us felt heart-broken. I found a wonderful person called Pop who was willing to buy it for us. It didn’t happen because even though the Council said the building had to be used for community use and no planning permission would be given, they sold it to a developer and after a long period of it standing empty, planning permission was given and now it has been turned into apartments. That’s life.
We are enjoying our new computer, our Mac Pro. It is very fast and the screen we are using is fabulous. I’m quite looking forward to doing the next magazine on it.
Things are on course with the current magazine. It seems to take forever, doesn’t it? I’m going to print out all of the address labels tomorrow and stick them on our address sheets over the weekend. That’s another tedious job, but it has to be done. When your magazine arrives remember I’ve sat for hours, catching up with Coronation Street on Sky Plus, sticking address labels on. Robin reckons the magazine should be ready to collect from the finishers on Monday. He’ll pack it on Monday and Tuesday and therefore it should be ready to post out on Wednesday.
And I’ve already started on the summer issue………….
It has been quite a day. I managed to get loads of post out this morning and tonight I’ve packed the Abbotsholme information packs so they can be posted tomorrow. But the exciting news is – we’ve got our new computer! It looks great. It is an Apple G5 (no that’s wrong, it’s a Mac Pro!) and is big and very fast. Andy has been busy installing the new software, but I think it will be awhile before we have everything we need transferred.
The lovely thing is we bought it from the Apple Store in Kingston upon Thames and we were helped by one of our almost-original members of Flutewise, James Preedy. James has been on loads of Flutewise courses in the past, when we held them at Corsica Hall. He now works as an ‘Apple Genius’ – well we always knew he was a bit clever. It was great to catch up with him again. One of the lovely things he told me was how he actually got interested in Apple computers after seeing ours. Flutewise has a lot to answer for, we don’t just inspire flute playing.
Over lunch we spent time reminiscing about past Flutewise courses, flute players and Apple computers. This is new computer is number 10 in the life of Flutewise. The very first one we had was a Macintosh Plus. It had a tiny black and white screen and only ran on floppy disks until we had to go and buy a hard drive because it was so slow. Those were the days.