Hilary Gavin

Weekly round-up: Managing life without a viable printer at home

By HILARY GAVIN

ONCE again I’m late posting my weekly round-up of Facebook commentary but I’ve got a valid excuse as I’ve been busy managing and cleaning my caravan holiday let at the Seal Bay Resort in the seaside town of Selsey, West Sussex.

Of course, I’d have been able to save a great deal of time, energy and a considerable amount of money if Big Business had sent me hardcopies of vital correspondence in the post rather than by emails that can so easily get lost in the Big Tech ether.

Sadly, I – like so many other people – cannot find a decent home printer for love nor money so I have to rely on local businesses to print out important policies and T&Cs for me to read and digest.

As a history graduate, I’m aware that I could drone on and on about Johannes Gutenberg‘s new printing press of the mid-1400s and its role in the Protestant Reformation in Europe in the Sixteenth Century, but I don’t want to bore you.

Instead, I’m sharing the trailer for one of my favourite movies A Walk In The Woods (2015) starring the late Robert Redford and Nick Nolte, who is brilliant as author Bill Bryson‘s overweight and reformed alcoholic pal Steven Katz.

So what has Bill Byson’s semi autobiographical memoirs of walking a stretch of the 2,190-mile Appalachian Trail in the USA got to do with the printing industry, I hear you ask. Well, nothing really, but the movie reminds me of Bill Bryson’s belly-laugh book Notes from a Small Island in which he recalls his travels in Britain.

I think I’ve told you that Bill Bryson worked as a sub-editor on The Times newspaper around the time of the Wapping Dispute in London in the mid-1980s and I found myself laughing out loud as he relayed the terror that the Fleet Street print union bosses held over hapless journalists before desktop publishing truly arrived.

Once again, I’m not going to go on but I recommend you take a look at Notes from a Small Island if you’ve got some spare time because it is very funny.

At the moment I’m feeling quite exhausted by the events of the past ten days so I’m not going to embed my Meta posts at my Facebook commentary group here but I’d invite you to read them.

As you can see, I’ve had a gripe about delivery men wearing motorcycle helmets to hand over alcohol in unsealed plastic bags, and I’ve taken a photo of the late showman Billy Smart’s statue at the Windmill amusement arcade in Littlehampton.

I reminded folk that the game of golf is “for everyone” (who can afford it) including the Seventies School’s Out rocker Alice Cooper, and I’ve flagged up the Anti-Slapp campaign plus updates on the coastal sea defences for Selsey being drawn up by Coastal Partners and supported by our MP Jess Brown-Fuller.

Of course, I’ve continued to write my A Year in my Back Garden snippets and I even had time for old-fashioned news reporting after a car crashed into the garden hedge on the B2145 in my patch as a freelance journo in the village of Hunston.

Anyhow, I hope you enjoy the read!

Hilary Gavin Avatar

By HILARY GAVIN

Copyright Monday, April 20th, 2026

Hilary Gavin

Freelance Journalist & Writer

6 Southover Way

Hunston

CHICHESTER

West Sussex

PO20 1NY

Tel: 07940 444664

email: grumpywoman@hilarygavin.blog

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