w/e 2026-10-18

I returned from Essex on Thursday after four days in a darkened dining room scanning 79 notebooks of my dad’s diary from 1955 to 2013. As regular readers will be sadly aware, being back there is always a mix of emotions. Last week I said I felt like a ghost haunting the house (I kept thinking of Ghost Story) but it’s at least as true to say that the house haunts me. It’s rarely been far from my thoughts for the past 2½ years and I have to struggle to think of other things – because I’m so tired of thinking about it – after turning off the light at bedtime. Anyway, I worked my way through 58 years of my dad’s life – 10,000 handwritten pages – resisting the urge to read much of it or I’d have been there for weeks. And probably been even more of weird jumble of emotions. I still have to colour correct the resulting 148 GB of TIFFs because while the speed of the CZUR ET-24 Pro made this task possible at all, it has problems with accurately reproducing colours. § A couple of years ago I…