h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thank you Trig,

Well, I suppose that I am old enough to be your grandmother. !!

I first worked on a computer in 1977 when there were no microchips; I used to have to write out myriads of cards and feed the information into the computer.

I have told this story several times, but cannot remember where I have writtem it.!! however my Masters thesis has the honour of being in the Library of Congress in the USA and the British Library and the British Muerum in the UK. I am very proud of it....

I had visited my daughter and her family who had moved to Hong Kong in the late seventies, and I did a computer course there. I then bought a small computer and brought it back to south africa plus a book on how to write programmes.

Anyway I managed and then did my Masters degree at the University of stellenbosch, having completed a BA in 1974 at the University of Cape Town.

As I had chosen a very sensitive area of research on Spith African, when I came across the philosophy of Phenomenology , it seemed the ideal one to adopt as it was "accused" by most current philospphers as being only a "descriptive" philosohy. So therefore providing that one's research was accurate and accessible to all, one could, if one knew one's facts, produce a reasonable corpus of work which could in fact criticize certain actions without actually de facto doing it. !!
Very necessary if one wanted to continue working in the difficult academic atmosphere which existed in south Africa at the time.

I had hoped to continue my doctorate when I came to England, but have decided that it is taking me all my time to complete the many unfinished manuscripts which are just crying out to be completed before my extended lifespan is cut short.

As my darling husband used to say to me twenty five years agao just before he died,

"There is only one thing certain in life and that is that ten out of ten die".

We used to laugh merrily about that, but having now entered my eightu second year, I feel that time is of the essence and I must finish what is half completed.

That is why I am so thrilled about the memory exercises which I have been doing. Today I remembered the name of the competitor whom I swam against in the Olympic Trials in south Africa in 1948. I had always longed to win a springbok blazer, but sadly the S.A. selectors did not see their way clear to sending a lone female swimmer when she had to have a chaperone!!.

The fact of this little bit of remembering is that one of the swimmers against whom I competited and beat in the Oly,pic Trials in 1948 was a lass called Joan Harrison. She actually was chosen to represent South Africa when they did in fact send a women's team in 1952 when the Games were held in Helsinki. Now that is empirical evidence and her name was Joan Harrison and she became the backstroke champion of the world.
I would have loved to have been that, but it was not to be. But I had "forgotten" that little bit of information in the passing years, and when I had a temporal stroke about twenty months ago, I had quite a bit of a problem even remembering who I was and where I was. !! Can be bothersome that.

Hence my joy at having been introduced to these brain exercises by Icy North I thiink it was who had read about them in the BBC mail.
So really DNA and this website have really made me live again, albeit in a wheelchair,but without pain, except occasionally.

What a screed I have written to you. apologies. I get excited when I rtemember Facts, and I remember that the very first research that was ever published in south Africa was when a colleague and I undertook a census of the housing stock in Cape Town for the CCC and called it "Facts and Figures". It did not help when he was tried and sentenced to prison for being a member of the communist Party which was then banned in South Africa.

Ah me!

! What a life I have led. And still going strong - well in a weak sort of fashion. !!

Greetings to you and forgive the long screed.

Christiane
AR80
Friday 18th June,2010 19.28 BST.

Please forgive the tyoo errirs, I have tried to correcdt them but my neck gets very sore when I have to bend close to my screen in order to edit it. !! I do not actually type with my neck....! A very weak joke..!