Month: Oct 2025

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Accepting One Invitation and Declining Another

I’m pleased to report I’ve been invited to take part in a Pecha Kucha event on Friday 7 November at the Dundee Rep Theatre.

These talks follow a rigid format. Speakers need to prepare 20 slides, which will be projected for exactly 20 seconds apiece, so the accompanying speech must match the time available. Less rigid is the choice of topic, which can be almost anything, provided it’s suitable for a family audience.

I’ll be talking about my trips around the Millennium Bridges in 2023 and 2025.

My challenge here was to take the complex story of the two trips and weave them into a story that the audience could easily follow. This meant indentifying suitably strong start and end points, while needing to eliminate a lot of detail along the way. If unconstrained, I could easily make the story into a half-hour speech.

I thought the accompanying pictures would be the easy part, since many of the were already taken. However, they all needed to be JPEG files converted to a specific resolution and dots-per-inch value. I’m not arty at all, so I relied on online tools with hit-and-miss results; one in particular kept converting pictures at random from JPEG to PNG.

The hard work won’t be over until the night of the presentation. While I have a good idea what my script says for each slide, I need to rehearse and make sure I hit all the relevant points.

But I can’t take every opportunity.

At the end of last week, an event organiser offered me a ten-minute slot to read poetry at his regular spoken-word event near the end of November.

I’ve wanted to go to this event for a long while, but it always clashes with my weekly writing group on a Tuesday. I was even inclined to write a new piece to fill the ten minutes.

Realistically, our own event has to take priority because our members expect us to be there. If my co-host or I know we can’t make a session, we try our best to cover or to make it an online-only event, depending on the type of interruption.

This time, it wasn’t possible to clear the day because of our other commitments. I reluctantly had to turn down his generous offer, with the caveat that I’d be happy to consider other days of the week.

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A Look Back to Ten Years Ago

I have a couple of upcoming projects that I’m not ready to talk about just yet. To fill the gap, I’ve instead looked backwards in time to the entry closest to today: 26 October 2015.

With the title Relentlessness, the entry described a hectic week. The open-mic night Hotchpotch held an event aboard the vintage HMS Unicorn, the Dundee Literary Festival had just been and gone, and the artist studios WASPS held an open weekend. I’d also been to see Hamlet at the cinema, presented by National Theatre Live, while our writing group was gearing up for National Novel Writing month.

As I read back this snapshot of events, they somehow don’t feel like they happened ten years ago, even though I rationally know they did.

For instance, WASPS studios is very much still open for business and Jen Robson is still around, albeit working from a home-based studio. Hotchpotch is still going, although we’ve never been invited back onto the Unicorn. Then we have National Novel Writing Group, which only ceased operations this year.

On the other hand, although none of us realised it at the time, the last Dundee Literary Festival would be held in 2016. It took until March this year for a replacement event, the Dundee Book Festival, to start up.

There’s something both appealing and lamentable about that ephemeriality. No doubt I’ll feel the same when I look back upon this year’s projects from 2035.

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Gttng Strtd Wth SMS

Last week’s entry was all about postcards. In writing about these, however, it was necessary to touch upon its replacement technology: SMS. I realised I had more to write on the matter. so today’s entry effectively serves as a part 2.

When the first SMS-capable handsets became available, they wouldn’t contain a full keyboard. Instead, each letter was mapped to the number pad in the following semi-standardised formation:

I say ‘semi-standardised’. The 0 key usually acted as spacebar, while 1 often produced symbols, but some layouts deviated from this. Ditto the toggling of capital letters, which we’ll disregard for the following demonstration.

To type the word BOOK, the following steps were necessary:

  • B required two presses of 2.
  • O – three presses of 6.
  • Pause for a second or press the right arrow, depending on phone, to allow the letter to register. O would otherwise loop back around to M.
  • O – three further presses of 6.
  • K – two presses of 5.

Overall, quite the frustrating process. It quickly became accepted practice to omit letters from words or use soundalikes. This might morph the word thanks into thx, or tomorrow into 2moro, which are still reasonably legible.

There were further innovations to come. One was the T9 system, which guessed each letter in context based on its neighbouring presses. To type the aforementioned BOOK, you would press the buttons 2-6-6-5 once each. The display might suggest BOOK first, but COOL or CONK could be selected from the menu, cutting down on overall presses.

Many phones would remember which words were used most commonly, but my Nokia 3330 never did. If I wanted to mention my pal Amy, I always had to scroll through BOX and COW.

Despite T9, the abbreviated style still persisted in popular culture for some time, with Fall Out Boy releasing a single as late as 2007 titled Thnks fr th Mmrs. It only died out when touchscreen input became more common.

Cards on the table, I was never sorry to see SMS speak disappear. Although it took longer, I liked to write my sentences out properly, and it could be challenging to decode some abbreviations. I much prefer what we have these days. No doubt the style will make a resurgence at some point, but I won’t be participating in that.

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A Quick Word About Postcards

Although postcards are now virtually obsolete in daily life, I can remember a time when they were used to enter competitions, to cast votes in polls, and to let friends and family know you’d reached your holiday destination safely.

But when I’m going away for a day or two, I like to maintain the last of those traditions. In most cases, I know I’ll arrive back home before the mail does, even when it’s within Great Britain, but it doesn’t diminish the surprise for the recipient.

A typical card measures around four inches by six, although there are wide variations, with the front featuring a picture or design. The back is split into two equal sections, so your text has to fit into that left section because the address and the stamp will take up the right-hand side. You can also buy books of plain postcards where the address and stamp go on the front, allowing use of the entire rear side.

Still, the fixed format forces you to pick your words wisely or to minimise the size of your handwriting. The inventors of the SMS initially chose 160 characters as the limit based upon those restrictions.

In the earliest days of mobile messaging, each one typically cost between 5p and 10p to send; those figures are not adjusted for inflation. Some handsets supported longer messages, but each block or partial block of 160 characters was charged separately.

Despite this, an SMS easily undercut the price of a stamp in the second half of the 1990s – shown by this table from The Great Britain Philatelic Society – especially as you didn’t need to buy a physical postcard either.

The cost of SMS and similar messages today is negligable. Most phone subscriptions have some element of inclusive or unlimited allowance, putting the higher cost into perspective. On a day trip to Birmingham yesterday, I sent just two cards, but they cost me 87p apiece in second-class stamps.

Knowing I might not have a chance later in the day, my intention was to write them both on the flight and post them at the other end. I forgot to take them out of my bag until we were almost ready to land, but they’re both now safely in the post awaiting delivery.