My sister has decided to give up driving – her sight has always been a problem and she felt it wasn’t going to be long before she was told to do so (she has frequent checks) and she’s given her car to Al, for Squiffany and Pugsley to use – they’re both learning to drive. For most of the time she’s been living here, I’ve normally driven when we’ve gone out together, but now we’re co-ordinating our diaries so that we don’t double-book.

We tried this a couple of years ago – not for everything, but for anything that might affect the other – on Google Calendar, but it wasn’t a great success. I normally use Apple calendar and don’t carry a paper diary any longer, which is great. It’s sometimes a minor nuisance to have to tap everything in on my phone, if there’s a lot of detail, but the convenience more than makes up for it. I can set up alerts, go straight from the calendar to the map, which comes up on the satnav as soon as I plug the phone in to the car and it backs up to the Cloud so, if I were to lose my phone, I’d have everything on my computer and could download it to another phone. It shouldn’t have been that much bother to do it twice, but it was, for both of us. And google calendar is, if you’re used to Apple, just that bit less convenient and neither of us really likes it.

So I’ve bought a teacher’s diary – just a basic one, but the point is that it starts in August, ie now. It is just as boring to write everything down twice, but never mind, it needs to be done. I had the bright idea of using different colour pens – green for my stuff, blue for Wink’s and red for both of us. It’s a pity really that we don’t both use the same phones – if I used Android or she used Apple, we’d be able to share, but this is a compromise that will work.

For a while, I did the same with Russell – I got a desk diary for us both to fill in, as well as the pocket diaries that we both then carried. In practice, it was only I who used it though. We used, usually on a Sunday evening because we were rarely out then (and often during the week) to sit down and check what we each had on in the week ahead. After a couple of years, I stopped bothering though, as the Sage neither filled it in or checked what I was doing. It was easier to just talk to each other…

*If you know this song, I’ll be amazed. It is on a pianola roll, one of the ones I used to play as a child. I suppose I still have it. The song itself is nearly 100 years old.