Dot your i's, cross your t's...

I was very worried that Aubrey Ballantine's emails were bouncing. The last I had heard from him was December 2003. So I asked Willie Shiri to check as they shared the same ISP. Willie sent an email to the email address I sent him, and lo and behold, Aubrey telephoned him, their first contact in 17 years, although they live in the same town!!

Aubrey with his much loved and respected sister,
the late Pamela Ballantine. Former Head Girl Pamela
was awarded the MBE for services to race equality,
London Borough of Redbridge in October 2000.
(Photograph courtesy Aubrey.)

The problem was that Aubrey had informed me of the change in his email address. I had entered that change in my main address book. However, I had not recorded the change in the email software that I use to send out to my huge Cathedralite audience. Reason, there used to be a small dot between the first name and the second name in the old email address, which was removed in the new address - a change I had overlooked.

When teachers tell us to dot our i's and cross our t's, they should now also tell us to look for dots and sometimes even remove them between first names and last names. Lesson learnt.

Talking about teachers, I had an email from Suhas Phadke who wants to have teachers attended the 54er reunion in November this year. He told me that the plans are going well. I have only 5 teachers (not counting those students who worked as teachers) in my list and I think only 2 from that era.

If any of you have contacts with teachers from Cathedral, please ask them to contact me so that I can forward their contacts to those organising reunions as most reunionists would welcome the participation of those who inculcated some values in us.

The weather is warming up here. Night temperatures are still around -10 C but the long day heats up to +8 C. So we can throw away our sweaters and long johns, and hopefully, I can start my long walks again.

But today, I sit in front of my computer all morning to "watch the commentary" of the second test match between India and Pakistan - yes, I said, "watch the commentary" as they have commercialised cricket so much that they have deprived us of listening to the commentary without paying for it. I do hope some of you will take this up as I learnt all my cricketing history by listening to Vizzy (Maharajkumar of Vizianagaram) when I dashed back from school to listen to him describing how Ghulam Ahmed was spinning out the opposition or Mushtaq Ali and Vijay Hazare were cracking the bowling around the field, and...

I wrote my first journalistic piece when I converted an audio commentary from BBC to a newspaper story when I was just 9 years old. I find it sad that my grandson cannot search the radio airwaves to listen to some fine audio commentary and learn from his experience of listening to commentators (not players in the garb of commentators) describe an occasion without the aid of visuals. Another nail in the coffin to the art of conversation.