Power of the Press

During the course of the last six months or so since I first put my schooldays website together, I've had something in the region of ten or a dozen exchanges of emails from various people who'd found it and said how much they'd liked looking at it. I very much enjoyed writing my story and putting it together, but it's doubly rewarding when people take the trouble to contact me and compliment me on it. I suppose anyone who hated their time at school wouldn't feel quite so kindly disposed towards it, but then again they presumably wouldn't have bothered looking in the first place.

One of the comments I did get suggested that it might be worth getting a mention in the local rag. It's something that had already occurred to me, especially as they have a "Nostalgia" section in which they've run stories featuring old local schools and ex-pupils, but I wasn't sure how receptive they'd be to something that was purely online. Nevertheless, I sent them an email last week, and yesterday got a reply saying one of their reporters would like to have a chat with me about it.

This afternoon, the phone rang. The woman on the other end asked if I'd been a pupil at Leamington College for Boys, and when I said yes, she said her son who now lived in Canada had gone to the school, she'd seen my site mentioned in the paper but couldn't get into it. We worked out between us that the paper had evidently already run the story, but had misprinted the URL. Duh! I thanked her for letting me know, and popped out to buy a copy - it comes out on a Friday. Sure enough, although the rest of what they'd printed was accurate enough, there was a typo: a y had become a v, effectively undoing all my good work! If I can get hold of their reporter on Monday, I shall be sorely tempted to suggest he goes back to school for some lessons in proofreading!