Well, I am certainly not going to be bored. I have Zoom presentations coming out of my ears, with five to deliver in three days this week, as well as some to listen to. The first of my own series starts tonight and I will be encouraging people to write their life stories, a great lockdown project. You can attend just this single talk if you wish but you need to hurry up and book! Having not, from choice, done any professional family history research for a while, recently, I had two requests on the same day. Obviously, I am limited to what I can do from home but I already have one happy customer and I am waiting for a marriage certificate before I can make progress on the other.

On the presentation front, I have had to climb the learning curve that is recording audio on to a power point. I thought I had cracked it as I worked my way through a whole presentation, doing the whole replaying and re-recording bit. The latter was a frequent occurrence as it is winter croaky voice season. It was going pretty well I thought, although I don’t sound my usual relaxed self, it is more like I am still getting used to auto-cue. Even though I am not using a script, it sounds as though I am, maybe because I am trying to enunciate clearly. At least it has slowed me down a bit. The problem came when I hit save. I was drastically revamping a previous presentation and it was in an old version of power point, which, wait for it, doesn’t support sound! By then it was too late to save as the new format. In the end there was nothing for it but to start all over again. It didn’t even seem to work copying the slides into a new format document, so it was definitely back to the drawing board on all fronts.

I am enjoying compiling the family history albums for my grandchildren. Probably more fun for me than it will be for them but I can hope.

As to the whole pre-diabetic thing. I’ve now consumed my Christmas cake (ok cakes), one of my all-time favourite foods and cooked before the diagnosis. Now I guess I take it seriously. The fitness watch is still enough of a novelty to get me out of the chair. I wore it for a couple of days doing just what I would normally do to see how little I did. Bearing in mind I am not leaving home at the moment, I was expecting it to be about 200 steps a day and was surprised to find it was around 1600. Encouraged by Martha, we signed up for a challenge involving us in walking 100 miles a month. After a bit of adjustment, we worked out that 6666 steps a day would do it and I’ve managed to stick to it since January 2^nd. I am a bit annoyed that we didn’t realise how many it was in time for 1^st January but hey ho. It probably sounds pathetic to my fitness fiend friends but I am consoling myself with the fact that it is four times what I was doing. As this has to be accomplished in my tiny house it does involve quite a bit of jogging on the spot. I tend to make up the numbers in the evening during the adverts on commercial television – a bit of an incentive to watch BBC! You have no idea quite how many adverts Dancing on Ice has until you try this. The challenge does involve sponsorship and thanks to lovely friends Martha and I are nearly at our modest joint target. Of course, it would be great if we smashed it. If anyone would like to donate to the mental health charity Mind, particularly relevant at the moment, here are the links for myself and Martha.

 Any minute now the watch will buzz to remind me that I haven’t moved yet today so I’d better get going.

Pictures of jogging would not be pretty sight so here are some flowers to cheer everyone up instead.