I made good progress with the Surface yesterday, thanks to Theresa’s comments. I have also taken Hat’s excellent advice and ordered “Microsoft Surface for Dummies”. Alas, not yet published.

I have dimmed the screen, thanks to Theresa, and found the virtual keyboard. I am still having trouble with Dropbox. I can access it all right, and there are all my husband’s files, as they should be. But I can’t set it up on the Surface.

Even the one in the Windows store won’t load (with no explanation or apology). Nor can I download it, as would be usual, from the Dropbox website – “won’t run on your device”. I suspect a conflict between it and the adjacent cloud onto which the Surface automatically backs up everything. So although we can download files from Dropbox on its cloud, and edit them, we can’t send them back up. Or at any rate, I haven't figured out how.

I’ve found a work-around. I’ve associated myself with the Surface cloud. I can download onto my desktop computer any file that my husband alters, and then drop it into Dropbox from there. He is rightly concerned that we mustn’t have multiple versions floating around in cyberspace – we must know where the definitive one is.

He is perfectly sound on matters like that, but I despair of his ever getting to grips with a computer. He has been using one for 30 years now, but he has never acquired the faintest notion of how they think. I smoothed his path by composing little macro’s in the old days. In the 90’s and 00’s when everyone in the world was mastering the basics of mice and logging on and how to create and arrange folders, he remained insulated. That experience of learning by interaction, familiar to us all, remains alien to him.

I fear it’s now too late. I think I’ll be able to make the Surface usable for him. I doubt if I’ll ever get him surfing the Web. That can be a task for his grandsons Archie or Alistair, the next time they’re here. And good luck to them.

Knitting

The sleeve speeds forward – more than half-way there, measured length-wise, although that’s deceptive because I’m still increasing stitches.

My sister registers no more than modified rapture for the Vitamin D pattern. But maybe Scotland will win the Calcutta Cup on Groundhog Day and I will be fully employed for the following six months, thus postponing the decision about the fate of the Japanese shirt.

If that happens,  I really must contrive to see it. I never have. It is genuinely of Indian manufacture, dating from the days when it was played for by Scottish and English civil servants in Calcutta itself. One of the oldest sporting trophies in the world, considered as a physical object. And I must be one of very few, to have knit it.