Dent, Cumbria

I'm sure I would be very entertained by your father's cine film of a young Mr Bean.

So would I, atrociously badly taken as most amateur cine films were, once converted to digital they could at least have been edited, improved, and preserved. But they vanished - no one would have thrown them away, but (like so many old things like my Dinky Toy collection) they just vanished. When I last came across them, 40 or more years ago, the (even then) ancient acetate 9.5mm film stock was so brittle that it disintegrated on touch. But the lost footage e.g. of a six-year-old me on the beach in Woolacombe is no great loss to our cultural history.

I went to Woolacombe once, so I hope I didn't see you there. My mother favoured Putsborough, which was the less-crowded end of the same beach.

How are you getting on with your new movie editor, by the way? Do you recommend it?

I found the moviemaker on my old XP, and then Windows 7, quite satisfactory. But the programme on my new Windows 11 appears not to have any transition features or any way of fading the sound in and out (unless it's me not having figured it). There seems to be a trend for gimmicks rather than basic features.

Ah well, at least I've learnt how to spell 'gimmick'. I'd gone my whole life thinking it was 'gimic' until I noticed my spelling underlined just now.

Other than trying out the basics, I've yet to use it, and have no idea if it can fade sound in and out. But (as it happens) I should be using it for real in the next week or so, when I hope to video the Newport Clock in action, and to mix the footage with that of the real thing.