"Hope Springs Eternal"

Well, well, well.

What started out as help and then started to feel like hard work and having awkward questions being fired at me has had a bit of a turn around.

It seems my last comments got through, before I bailed on that page lol.

Now this IS encouraging as someone I thought would be unreachable ... well seems to have been reached though i am not quite sure how it came about. Did they read the BLOG? Was it something I posted?

Really it matters not merely the fact that someone tricky can actually see the light, so to speak.

This has been one of the fears of this blog when I started it. Would be listen?

Would they see things that are clearly laid out before them?

Would visitors fall into the stereotype that they are only looking out for number one but when their chips or cooked come running for comradeship among similar folk?!

Could they be taught something I learnt a long time ago in that helping others can often have a positive effect on yourself and you can suddenly benefit from it?!

A lecturer I was very friendly with at Middlesex University taught me that! I have always been helpful towards others and always been in may nature. But attending university and having several deadlines to meet at any one time for a period of three years makes you panic somewhat and when you are popular, as I was at University, many fellow students run to you with questions and problems and you kind of want to draw away from that as you have your own stuff to work out...

...however he said something to me about helping others and that sometimes if you do then sometimes your own solutions present themselves?! I said he was totally bonkers and he laughed. He said that to get an idea of what he said if I was banging my head against a monitor screen staring for endless hours at C++ and JAVA code and could not see the wood for the trees that I should stop, take a break and go and do something completely different.

He was dead right!

One day I had been called across a laboratory by a friendly Jamaican woman called Mary, in fact that day she was teased by everyone about how she always calls after me when she has a problem and jokes about fancying me, which really embarrassed to poor girl. Like me she was a mature student and i was trying to solve a problem with my own programming code, though which language we was using I cannot recall. So I reluctantly went across and read through her code and I pointed at a couple of lines and asked 'what is this trying to do?' when she answered I then told her what the problem was and changed to code for her so that it worked.

A I finished doing this I suddenly had an epiphany and sprinted across to my own monitor, changed a few lines and 'VOILA' it worked. I stared at the screen grinning before laughing and said 'you son of a gun, it actually works?!' I then got asked what I meant and with this lecturer being highly popular and everyone was aware of our matey relationship I told them what he had told me.

That year helping each other become the in-thing to do!

Likely one of the small reasons and many things that I did that led to being offered a PhD I stupidly turned down feeling I was too old at 31?! LMAO!

One of the many big mistakes I had made in my life but none of us are gifted with the ability to peer into our own future to make snap decisions like that. Always with hindsight...

Alastare Measures was the lecturers name! I hope he and Tamsin are very happy wherever they may be!

So hope really does spring eternal ... maybe ken was right, maybe this is possible after all?!