seeing red…..

Bounty Bar cake – recipe from forkandpixel.com

There are, in my life, two new era defining acronyms to add to the familiar BC and AD, to wit BS and AS, which demarcate those periods in time before and after the advent of the saviour, aka Spellcheck ( interestingly, Spellcheck has just denied the existence of “saviour” which is a bit worrying). In the ancient time of BS I remember being as an immortal in that it seemed impossible for me to incorrectly spell a word in Egnlish…and there it is….. the wax drips from the melting wings of my keyboard as I spiral down into AS, a red slash of a wound waiting to bleed beneath my failure. One click of a mouse on the bloody line and that which was Egnlish is reincarnated as English. The intimate linkage of hand, pen and paper allows a direct flow of knowledge from brain to page without the intervention of another intelligence or the inconvenience of mastering a keyboard. I have minimal hand to eye coordination which defect, at school, determined that I should be banned from the cricket pitch, where I could quite easily be killed by bat or ball, and be resigned to the river where I would become the smallest rower in the history of the school and where, with any luck, I would disappear, hopefully unnoticed, into the murky waters thus avoiding bringing any more shame on the alma mater. I mention this failing as a computer makes similar demands in that it requires my fingers to accurately type on a keyboard, obscured from view, leaving my eyes to judge that the chosen letters are appearing, as chosen, and in the correct order on a screen some distance away from my hands and my person. The tactile intimacy of pen and paper is lost but convenience is gained. Welcome to AS, where convenience outweighs intimacy to such an extent that the computer empowers me to tap out words that will allow me to share intimacy with a complete stranger whilst sparing me the inconvenience and  misunderstandings that may result from a real life encounter, such as being mistaken for a fortune hunter or a white slaver, and, above all, without any misspellings. It was such a double “s”, as in the word ” misspelling”, that led me to begin this diatribe, or, more honestly, the mistaken belief that such a double “s” existed in the word “dessicated”, which of course it doesn’t: but I didn’t know that until SC, red in tooth and claw, slashed its disapproval beneath my attempt and led me to the desiccated light. Had I not decided to make the wonderful Bounty Bar Cake, that I discovered on Fork and Pixel, the packet of desiccated coconut that had lain at the back of my store cupboard since BS, or even longer, might have continued to lay therein for many more years, steadily desiccating to an irredeemable ( I didn’t spot the double “r” in that word until I saw red) dryness when all that would remain would be the plastic bag emblazoned with “Desiccated Coconut” to remind the finder of how to correctly spell that which once lay within. I suppose that’s the point of gravestones.

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