Yesterday put me in a good mood: My continuing investigation of my late father’s slides had come to a halt: the over-40-year-old projector mentioned in this post frankly was too unreliable and too scary to leave switched on for any time, and had limited magazines, and the more modern one broke its changer mechanism. While I have a slide scanner, and a battery-powered viewer, they’re very inconvenient ways to deal with hundreds of slides.

I’d purchased a replacement projector- identical- via Gumtree, but unseen. When it arrived, it failed to light, and the seller was, shall we say, uninterested- caveat emptor. A brief attempt at repair or perhaps creating one worker out of the 2 failed: I’m usually quite good at getting things apart and back together, but the sheer quantity of pingfuckits in the device and reluctance for the case to open when I got the first one apart told me that way was madness.

I considered everyone’s favourite online tat bazaar, but unless one came up locally, so I could see it working, that was a non-starter, so I made a post on the Walsall Freecycle group- and it was a matter of hours before a kind benefactor in Rushall offered 2 projectors, with magazines, that both work after very minor fiddling. While the idea of Freecycle is, well, free, I’ll be making a charity donation in recognition of someone’s generosity, and the fact that otherwise I’d have risked money again. In the spirit of this, can I suggest joining the Walsall Freecycle group (or your local one if you live elsewhere)? You might get rid of stuff you need to and help someone out.

I’ve now spent a few happy hours looking through old slides: I know in there there’s one or two that may interest people: they’ll get scanned and posted when I find them.