Making an imovie

I am the first to admit that technology is not my forte. I still prefer shorthand to taping conversations and I have ongoing “technical issues” with my mobile phone and laptop that cause me to call them all sorts of unpleasant names which they probably don’t deserve – and are recording for later use against me. The mobile phone, as has been stated in numerous previous blogs, has patchy reception in our house, including the garden and street, and, interestingly, the entire primary school area. The other day I had to do a radio interview. I was going to a meeting so arranged to do the interview en route to the meeting. The timing for the interview was 9.20am. I figured I could get away from the school and to the car park of our local garden centre by 9.20am with a fair wind behind me. This was the nearest quiet place with potential mobile reception. However, at 9.18am I was still going 20 mph behind a huge truck just outside the garden centre. I arrived just in time for the call, but somewhat tense.

Despite my technology problems, I am always keen to learn new stuff so I volunteered to start making some imovies for work. A friend of mine had talked me through it and he’s no computer whizz so I thought it seemed fairly straightforward. I’ve edited audio and video in the past. How hard could it be? To do an imovie, you need an iphone or ipad. I do not have an iphone. However, daughters one and two have got one. Daughter two has my old work one and daughter one got a cheap one off eBay with a smashed screen as a present. Very reluctantly daughter two agreed to lend me hers. I chose her because her phone was formerly mine so I felt I had more rights.

Daughter one is constantly attached to her phone, even though using it in school carries a detention penalty. She once got detention when some random company sent her a text message during break time and it pinged because she had forgotten to turn the phone off. This may be in part behind her constantly having her phone on airplane mode, meaning I can never contact her. She, however, claimed it was because she is trying to avoid radiation poisoning. She listed all the latest studies. I told her the evidence was inconclusive. She diverted the conversation to talking about the dangers of milk and asked why I am ‘poisoning’ only son by giving him milk. She spends much of her time finding holes in my parenting technique, if you can call it that. Only son, for instance, has been coming home every night with sugar smart leaflets for his sisters. “They need to be sugar smart and healthy,” he says.

The trouble is that only son does not actually pay any attention whatsoever to the sugar smart leaflets’ content. Only son likes leaflets a lot and we tend to emerge from any shop with handfuls of them – the Post Office is one of only son’s favourite spots – so, with regard to sugar smartness, he feels it is enough to bring home the leaflet before helping himself to a bowlful of cereal. “There is no sugar in Weetos,” he said solemnly the other day despite all the evidence to the contrary. “Are you letting him eat that?” asked daughter one incredulously. Only son had helped himself while I had been otherwise detained cleaning his lunch off his school uniform. Not for the first time I wondered how a person can get most of their lunch on their shirt collar.

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