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That's an interesting anecdote about Stephen. One hears of this sort of pupil/teacher relationship but rarely from the teacher's viewpoint. The situation is not uncommon, I understand – isn't there some standard way of dealing with it?

Interesting stuff.

ROPE OF SAND 24 – Brian Jordan

I've replied to Brian by letter on his question about using dot-matrix on ordinary stencils, but if anyone else is contemplating going primitive (but Oh so cheap) – the danger of clogging up the pins with 'wax' has always put me off the idea. I suppose it depends on how ready you are to buy a new print-head if the worst happens – I remember Maureen and Paul used to go merrily ahead. I raised the question in a genzine once (PULP – late '80s) and got a reply from Australia that someone had wound in a sheet of some thin transparent plastic between the print-head and the paper, and had good results. As it happens, all the while I've had a dot-matrix printer I've also had an electro-stenciller, so the question never became really pressing – I just electro-stencilled ms. Which I'm still ready to do for anyone wanting same, by the way.

MOVING TARGET – Brian Stovold

Interesting end to the travelogue, with the climax of the – er – ship-wreck? Nice crack about refusing to sing 'Abide with me'. Typical British stiff upper-lip. And a little melancholy with "The memory and the tan have faded". It's always so, which is why I'm such an enthusiast for getting it in writing – in other words, fanzines. (Comment/hook?). There's now loads of my memory completely gone – except for the record in fanzines.

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And that appears to be the lot. But I just hate blank spaces on a page. Do something original? But I don't usually do anything original these days. I don't know if it's old age or the cumulative effect of pills to combat high blood pressure (I remember John Brunner used to complain about those), but the ideas I used to have refuse to be pinned down onto paper.

Current reading? Most of the latest books I've read are all about computers – Word Made Simple, Windows 3.11 for Dummies, 10 Minute Guide to PC Computing (!), Windows Made Simple, and, from the Library, The Internet Made Simple and Computing for the Terrified. Yes, a lot of tutorial book titles seem to dig into that crack in the self-confidence of the ordinary man-in-the-street. If you want to put up a new bookshelf you can get a drill, screws, screwdriver, a saw and wood, and get down to it with the knowledge that you can rig up something, But computers are something else again. Ever heard of a book called Carpentry for Dummies?. Or Bookshelves Made Simple? I wouldn't think so.

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But I've suddenly remembered that there was a comment or two I meant to make on Ken Lake's remarkable offering, which I vaguely thought I wouldn't have room for. It's about the sudden incursion into his bell ringing article of a paragraph about Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and his 'theory of morphic resonance'. His theory was that a 'web of inherited memory exists.....the experiences and advances of one person to be shared by all'.

This sounds far too much like science-fiction on some fantasy world. It has distant echoes of David Brin's fascinating The Practice Effect, where on an alien planet articles improve the more they're used and deteriorate when not. And if inherited memory existed, wouldn't children be able to tap it and talk perfectly (as far as their physical make-up went) from very early days?

But there is certainly more here than is dream't of in our philosophy. According to Steve Pinker in his The Language Instinct (Wm. Borrow, '94), "between the late twos and the mid-threes, children's language blooms into fluent grammatical conversation so rapidly that it overwhelms the researchers who study it, and no one has worked out the exact sequence. Sentence length increases steadily and because grammar is a discrete combinatorial system, the number of syntactic types increases exponentially, doubling every month, reaching the thousands before the third birthday".

Pinker then develops his theory of a language instinct. And certainly, from personal experience, there's something strange going on. Whilst my four-year old grand-daughter is awake she's talking, and the slip-ups in grammar are so few that they're something to be noted by adults who happen to be listening. Weird, huh? AVC