Amstrad

Letter to the Guardian, several years ago:

I’ve been waiting for years to tell this story. I was working with a writer who also happened to be a member of one of the communist parties. He knew his phone was tapped, lots of clicks and occasionally a playback of the conversation.

We were putting together a proposal for an Arts Council grant. I’d phoned him to check the final draft and was reading it out as it came off the printer on my Amstrad.

I thought I’d cracked the problem of how to align the decimal places on the budget sheet but as the last page came off I saw I had failed again. “Oh (expletive),” I said. “N—, do you know how to sort this?” “I’ll get the manual,” he said. But a voice cut in: “If it’s the PCW 8512 then you have to...” she said, and stopped. We both begged her to go on, but nothing. (I still can’t get the things aligned.)

Margaret Sheehy
London