At least the hope of a vaccine is now with us although the suggestion from the Prime Minister that we should be able to be immunised by Easter is disappointing to say the least. It needs to happen much sooner than that.
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As everyone who reads this blog knows, I aim to go out for a lengthy walk each day which I find does help with the mental side of this situation. For the rest of the day I keep as busy as I can but I won't pretend that at times it's not a struggle locking the door late morning and knowing that the next 12 hours will be spent indoors.
I am one of the lucky ones as there aren't a great deal of demands on me, I don't have financial pressures and I just feel so sorry for the thousands who have lost their jobs and have genuine problems.
I am busy tidying up and sorting out my study - updating folders and throwing things away. Writing the Herald keeps me in touch what what's going on (or should that be not going on) in the village.
And coming across old copies of the Hethersett Mercury has made me think about printing over the years.
When I started as a journalist in the early 1970s I worked with a portable typewriter which had been a birthday present. I would write my stories on small pieces of paper which were often offcuts and scraps. If I remember correctly you could get about three paragraphs (depending on length) on a sheet. It was called copy paper and you put a piece of carbon paper between sheets so that a copy of every article could be kept in the office. Eventually the copies found their way onto a rather strange contraption called a spike which was just a solid piece of wire set into a wooden or metal base. The spike was also home for used press releases and information sheets/letters etc you had finished with. Occasionally you would take the bottom pieces off your spike and shred them.
When your piece of journalism was complete you would number the pages with a title which would usually be one word. So a story might be entitled butcher 1, butcher 2, butcher 3 if it referred to a story about the local butcher. At the bottom of each page you would put either mf or end. Mf stood for more follows.
You would then fold the papers up and pop them in a tray on a filing cabinet. If you had a difficult name in your story, in order to indicate that you had checked it you would write the word [correct] inside brackets.
At the end of the working day all the copy would be picked up by a delivery van which also delivered newspapers to newsagents and shops. It would then be taken to Prospect House in Rouen Road, Norwich, the HQ of Eastern Counties Newspapers for typesetting.
I also remember when working in Beccles, taking the daily parcel down to the local bus station to be taken to Norwich to be picked up. This mode depended on the bus driver remembering to take the parcel off the bus at the other end. I can't remember the method of printing in those days but I guess it may still have been "hot metal." This was a really messy and probably costly process.
I remember at Lowestoft there being a massive machine which took up almost an entire room in the basement. This had a small keyboard but so many workings. Copy (stories) could be typed up on it and sent over to head office where a member of staff sat with an equally cumbersome machine. Before going through this process you had to phone the person at the other end to alert them to the fact that something would be coming over. The only thing I remember doing this way was my weekly Lowestoft Town football report for the Pink Un football paper.
Gradually the printing processes were modernised. Hot metal gave way to bromide, which was strips of paper cut up by compositors with insanely sharp knives and pasted onto templates. Still pretty messy. When I became a sub editor and then sports editor in Norwich, my Thursday evenings would be spent working alongside the printers as they pasted the stories onto the pages. They worked to page lay-outs and designs put together by us but of course sometimes there was too much copy for a page and it had to be cut down. On others the copy fell short so a lot of fiddling around had to take place. Mind you as journalists we weren't allowed to touch the type or pages, we just had to stand by the shoulder of the comp and give instructions.
Then of course we went into desk top publishing and the whole thing was revolutionised. Without desk top publishing I wouldn't be able to produce the Hethersett Herald. My how we have advanced.
I still remember vividly the week we went to desk top publishing. We had a couple of days' training but the first week was very hit and miss and I can't pretend I knew what I was doing. It was very much stabbing in the dark. Somehow we got the papers out and then things got much easier as we came to terms with the new processes.
On that first Thursday evening, a group of people were being shown round what was then Eastern Counties Newspapers (now Archant). Clubs and groups regularly visited the newspapers to see the processes and Thursday night was publication night for the weekly papers. I still remember the excitement when you saw the product of your week's labour roll off the presses.
Anyway this all female group crowded round my machine and I was asked to show them the new process - the new process that I was really struggling with. Somehow I managed to wing it, sound like I knew what I was talking about and off they went to see the presses roll.
Listening in to what I had been saying was a legendary Norfolk reporter by the name of Charles Roberts who was an art critic whose reviews always went under his initials CVR. Charles was a journalist of the old school. I got on very well with him most of the time but I'm sure he saw me as "a young upstart."
When the group left he came over to me "that was a load of nonsense you told that group," he said. "Yes I know but I had to say something and I'll tell you something else Charles, I'll be going to bed with one of them tonight."
When Charles was dumbstruck he just said "WELL" in a very loud voice and stalked off. What I didn't tell him was that the group was from Wymondham Ladies Circle and one of them was my wife. That's why I had been picked out to show them the new system.
CVR was the butt of many office jokes. He had a "little black book" where he kept phrases he had come across and which he could use in his reviews. One day one of the other reporters found Charles' little black book and used as many of the phrases as he could in a feature he was writing. That kind of thing went on quite a lot. When I worked at Lowestoft we would have a word or phrase of the week which we had to get into as many stories as possible. We also had competitions to see how many Beatles or Rolling Stones songs you could get into a story.
On another occasion Charles turned up at the office in a white suit: "I'll have a 50p cornet please," one of the reporters said. Charles shouted an even louder "WELL" than usual and stormed out of the office.
Charles usually reviewed concerts for the Eastern Daily Press and I often reviewed for the Eastern Evening News. I usually reviewed rock and pop concerts but on one evening I was asked to review an opera. I can't remember which opera it was but I was struggling. I had no idea whether it was good, bad or indifferent.
Those were the days when the wonderful and legendary Dick Condon was general manager at Norwich Theatre Royal. Dick was a genius showman - a genial extrovert Irishman who did so much to put Norwich on the arts' map. I will relate some of my Condon stories in tomorrow's blog. Dick would provide drinks for the press at the interval and the end.
I decided that at the end of the show I would try to find out what Charles thought of the opera and whether his review would be glowing, average or mediocre towards the show. Problem is he rumbled what I was doing and clammed up.
Well, discretion being the better part of valour, I decided to give a glowing review. So I glowed about the production and in particular glowed about the performance of the leading man.
A couple of weeks later I received a handwritten letter from Italy from the leading man. Obviously it was in Italian. Luckily my assistant editor was married to an Italian lady and spoke the language fluently. The letter thanked me profusely for my comments and said how kind I had been. I knew it was a good letter because even I understood "bellissimo".
I waved it in front of Charles and pointed out that he hadn't received a letter. "WELL" he shouted "you young whippersnapper."
I did impress Charles one Thursday night, however, when I compared Mahler's third symphony to Bruckner's fourth and this time I did know what I was talking about because, as I told CVR, my favoured mode of music might be rock and pop but I was brought up on classical and loved that also.
When he retired, Charles Roberts went to live in France and he died a number of years ago. He was certainly a character and there aren't too many of those around today.