Ira has a difficult time with technology

Our correspondent, Poetry Editor and Friend, Ira Maine, has had his difficulties over the past few months.  No one feels sorry for him.  However he has had a Dickens of a battle re-establishing contact after removing himself to the outer reaches of Tolmedia.  Not only was he with out phone, without interenet, and the mail delivery person refused to recognise his address but his computer decided to give up the ghost.  These trials would be hard to face for a younger person, they are morbidly trying for a not so tech savvy man in his golden years. Morbidity has been to the forefront of his mind.

Fortunately light has shone on his troubled visage.  His correspondence with Cecil Poole shows how the light plays.

Cecil, 

I have recently acquired a well used Apple MacBook from Wayne. (His son, ed)

‘It’s been under my bed for a year!’ he cried, ‘ I have all I need with my iPhone!  It’s a gift.  Take it!’

He held it out to me, his face flushed.

Ira and Cecil ” walk” the macbook home.

Humbly a tear welled up in my eye, but not before I almost broke his fingers wrenching the thing out of his grasp.  It reminded me of the cannibalism more than hinted at in that old Spencer Tracy film ‘The Northwest Passage’, I think?, where Spence marches his faithful (though starving) band of Davy Crockett look-a-likes all over the US in search of something to eat.  One of Spencer’s number solves this problem by casually eating a dead colleague.  Consumed with guilt, (and the tastier bits of his mate) the fellow goes nuts and, with all of the appropriate decorum of a well trained, rugged frontiersman, flings himself down into a deadly and dizzying chasm, never to be seen again.

This newly acquired bit of equipage has flung up correspondence that the old Tablet was ill equipped to deal with.  Suddenly a September message from yourself asks, craves and wonders if one might return a tome to you. ‘Boswell’s Presumptuous Task’ by Adam Sisman is the one I’ve dug out.  I have put it aside (providing that is the book in question) 

You will, naturally, visit the Algonquin whilst in NY and pay homage to Ms Parker and her scurrilous band, I hope.  (Strangely Ira assumes Cecil still in the USA, even though it is well past September -Ed)

I’m delighted you are both having a such a nice holiday.

Regards to Herself.

Ira 

To which Cecil responds cautiously –

Dear Ira

Ira transformed. New I Pad, hairstyle and blow-wave, ( courtesy of the Rt.Hon Christopher Pyne)

Due to continental drift we are now on Hamilton Island in the Whitsunday’s QLD.  Here for a few days then to Sydney where I’ve arranged to meet with Lord Atney of Rozelle, and straighten the mess that is the ABC.   Home via Canberra and National Museum, where History is told via One Hundred Objects.. 

Do hope you are able to navigate your way around the MacBook, mine seems to work most of the time.

Trust your leg has healed successfully

In Excelsior

Harold the Lost.

Then we have Ira again

Dear Jeroboam,

Ira still needs to be coached on correct ipad usage. Still, in Tolmordia this guarrantees good reception.

I have, due to hamfisted washing up techniques, not only broken all my continental plates, but local visiting dipsomaniacs have recently polished off all my tectonics.to the point where I have not a drop of tonic in the house. IN-Continental drift sees me frequently in attendance at the very best lavatory facilities in the area where man-made hurricanes provide vast amusement to passersby.

I am presently in Tierra Del Fuego where I hope to solve the ticklish intricacies of bartfargling my canticle’.s bromelitron.

I’ll be home in time for tea.

Ira Maine Esq.