Candice writes:
On Valentine’s Day there was discussion on Radio 4 about Brief Encounter and the most interesting thing I learnt was that the screenplay was edited by telegram, because Noel Coward was in India at the time the film was being made. I wondered about the implications of this and how it must concentrate the mind on the task – does it account for every word in the script being very carefully chosen with absolutely no room for superfluous talk, and does that in turn help to make it such a wonderful film?
It made me think about the differences in the way I’ve been editing documents recently - by email, in collaboration with several others using ‘tracking changes’ and ‘comments’, and actually being able to waffle at length with the risk of the precise intended meaning being lost – either in formulation or in transmission.
So is there something to be said for the discipline of editing by telegram? Probably not, but an interesting idea I thought.

Doodle.ch

We're playing with a meeting planning tool called Doodle. You can get it here.
If you want to arrange something with a number of people you can set up a poll and they can easily vote for any of the slots they are available for. Then it's very easy to see which date everyone can manage.

postcards

Julia writes: The Lancaster Literacy Research Centre is having an internal competition to issue a new set of postcards. The current set is absolutely magnificent so I am not sure I have anything to enter. However I did snap this recently as it amused me. - but unfortunately when uploaded it's hard to see that the sign on the left says 'No Parking'.

These remind me that Guy Cook said recently that signs often indicate the opposite of their apparent meaning. For example a sign that says 'no exit' on a door means that you could get out of it.