Diamond Geezers

The wife of one of the Lions Club members died a couple of months ago and, thinking it might help him to have another project to distract him, I gave him the latest draft of Diamond Geezers, the history of Brighton Lions Club on which I have been working. I knew also that he would be the most likely person to spot ambiguities, commas that should be full stops and so on. What I had forgotten was his aversion to the word "that". He returned the manuscript over the weekend with all but about two occurrences of the word marked for deletion. I think he is obsessed and that the word should be used in some places, although I have to agree that there are a number of places where it is over-used. I am now working my way through the file and in most of those places (so far) I have rewritten the sentence so as to avoid using the dreaded word, but I think it should stay in, for example, the following sentence: "It was estimated shortly after the display that the club had made a profit of £1,400."

What really frustrated me was that when I tried to open the file on my computer I discovered that on saving it, the computer had corrupted it. I had then copied the freshly-corrupted file onto a memory stick. Fortunately, I did have a slightly older version which I was able to open, but now I have to try to remember where I had made alterations and how I had written the updates.