This is an edited version of a post that appeared on my old blog on October 26th 2006.

When I was young we lived in Brighton. We had a cat called Toby, a tortoise called André after a favourite character in a story on children’s radio and later a dog, a small female Scottish Terrier known as Miffy. Along with these creatures, we had goldfish, tadpoles, newts and Tiger Moths. The goldfish, tadpoles and newts never did well. In fact, their mortality rate bordered on the scandalous. The Tiger Moths, on the other hand, did extremely well.

We had a back garden with poor soil and a lawn which was no doubt a fragment of the original field on which the houses had been built. My mother fought to maintain some semblance of order and beauty in it but this was an uphill struggle. Every year, along with slugs, snails, woodlice, ants, wasps and all sorts of worms and grubs, the garden would host a contingent of brown furry caterpillars. I would collect one (or sometimes more), put it in a jam jar with a perforated lid and keep it well supplied with peony leaves.

Left to their own devices, caterpillars are eating machines. They eat all day long with a wonderful dedication to the task in hand. I would watch as the caterpillar’s head swung rhythmically right and left as it consumed the peony leaves it was resting on. That’s about all it ever did, except produce dark brown droppings and get bigger and bigger, until it suddenly stopped eating.

It would then remain still for some time, perhaps hours or a day, as if lost in thought. More than once, I thought the caterpillar had died. But no, all at once the head movement began again but now the creature was not eating. At first it was hard to see what it was doing, especially if, as often happened, it had betaken itself inside a cluster of leaves. After a while it became apparent that around it were forming very fine silver threads. Over the next few hours, the caterpillar would labour away, producing threads and as it did so, it would gradually disappear from view. At last all movement would cease and the jar could be set aside pending the next exciting development.

That development was, of course, the emergence of the Tiger Moth. Tiger Moths are spectacular creatures. The body is is furry and the head and shoulders are covered by a dark brown cape of fine brown hair. The front wings are brown with a line pattern of white or beige, hence the “tiger” name. It is the rear wings that startle you with their contrast because they are orangey red with dark blotches. These are intended to protect the moth from birds and other predators who take red as a danger signal.

On one occasion, the moth emerged while we were out. I always left the top off the jar so they could escape but this one had found herself confined within the house. She had glued a set of tiny green eggs to the side of the settee.

Sometimes, the moth would not have emerged before we were due to go on holiday, so the jam jar went with us. One year we went to stay with my sister in a small village in Cardiganshire. My mother fell ill and, while she was recovering, I attended the village school for a term. I had two caterpillar jars with me and Mr Griffiths, one of the schoolmasters, heard about them and asked me to bring them to school. One of the moths had emerged, leaving behind its broken pupa case. Mr Griffiths was most interested. For my part, I was amazed to find that I, a townee, knew more about moths than the village children did. It is one of those curious things that those who live surrounded by the wonders of nature are often those who know least about it.

I’m glad to say that the antibiotics seem to have done the trick as I am feeling better and the symptoms have diminished.

Ironically, my worst day was Thursday, after I had seen the dentist and started taking the pills. My gum above the troublesome tooth was swollen and my throat was sore enough to make swallowing uncomfortable. I felt cold and feeling cold always makes me miserable.

Today (Friday), I seem to have turned the corner, so to speak. The swelling has diminished, my throat is no longer sore and “I feel better in myself”, as my mother would have said. I can look forward to the weekend.

Of course, I still have to see my usual dentist on Tuesday and find out what he thinks about the tooth that caused the trouble. Is it as bad as the stand-in dentist suggested? That is a cloud on the horizon that I will try to ignore until the moment arrives.

When I reached the dentist’s surgery around 9 am, I found the reception area, which doubles as a waiting room, crowded. This is explained by the fact that this dentist, unlike my usual one, runs a walk-in service.

As I expected, I was asked to fill in a form detailing my state of health and to pay the standard NHS fee of £22.70. (Unlike the rest of the NHS, dental treatment is not free and there is a scale of charges, unless you are on Income Support, in which case there is no charge. Most dentists now treat clients both on the NHS and privately. The client can also mix NHS and private treatment.)

In view of the large number of people, I prepared myself for a long wait. (I have mentioned before that being treated by the NHS schools you in patience!) I was pleasantly surprised to be called about 45 minutes after I arrived. I was instructed to go to the first floor (that’s the second floor in American 😉 ). Here I found a second waiting room but tarried here only short while before being collected by a nurse and conducted to a treatment room.

I was attended to by a young male dentist who was polite and friendly. He examined my whole mouth and took an X-ray of the affected area.

He diagnosed what I had suspected, namely an infection which was the source of the pain. This was caused by a tooth suffering decay which would need root canal work, if it can be saved, or extraction if not. He prescribed antibiotic pills which should reduce the infection and thereby the pain. We left it that I would seek follow-up treatment from my own dentist with whom I have an appointment for next Tuesday.

Home now, I have taken the first pill and am waiting hopefully for the pain to subside.

If anyone requires evidence that the universe and life on earth are not created by a rational mind, I offer teeth as the killer argument. I can hardly imagine a better example of a failed design than teeth.

Yesterday was a painful day. I had a toothache a couple of weeks ago and managed to secure an early appointment with my dentist. He could find nothing wrong and as the pain had subsided by then, we agreed on a “wait and see” policy.

The pain returned last Saturday but subsided after I took a painkiller in the night. I tried to make an appointment with my dentist but was told he was on holiday and couldn’t see me until Tuesday next week.

The pain returned yesterday and the first dose of painkiller failed to have any effect on it. I took a second does around midnight and fell asleep.

The tooth is not so painful this morning but the whole area if the jaw is tender and I fear that the pain will return. There seems little point in contacting my usual dentist’s surgery given the fact that they have already given me an appointment.

I decided to contact the NHS 111 service via their website, as they were very helpful with a previous emergency and found me a doctor’s appointment on the same day. This time, however, having filled in the questionnaire I was simply taken to a page showing the addressed if three local dentists, one of which is my usual one!

I have read the reviews of one of them, which seems quite good, and dealt with the reviewers on the same day. They open today at 9 am so I am going to call on them in person in the hope that they can see me and at least diagnose what the problem is.

More later!

This post is rather long. If it’s too long for you to read, I will not think badly of you. It is just possible, though, that the content may be useful to somebody.

In my post A better blog editor, I recounted how I had tried various apps for writing posts for my blog on my iPhone and had finally settled where I had started, with the native Notes app. At the time, this seemed to do everything I needed, including inserting photos and writing in italics and bold.

Having set up my new iPhone 8 with iOS 13, I was disappointed to find that text written in italics and bold in Notes lost their style when I copied and pasted the text into the WordPress editor. I do not know why this is, whether it has been caused by a change in iOS 13 or a change in a recent update of the WordPress editor but, whatever the cause, the effect is there to irritate me.

There are a number of possible solutions to this, of course. I could, for example, write my posts in the editor of the WordPress app but while this has the advantage of directness (no copying and pasting) there is a risk of losing work if I quit the edit screen without remembering to save to draft. In any case, I prefer to work in an entirely separate editor as this feels less risky somehow. (No chance of accidentally posting an unfinished article, for example.)

The other solutions involve finding an editor to use instead of Notes. As I wrote in my original post, I have tried very many of these without finding the combination of features that I want.

With a wearisome sense of déja vu, I nonetheless revisited some of these apps. Word processors and programmers’ editors are, generally unsuitable, the first because they are more complex than I need and don’t handle images as simply as Notes or the WordPress editor do and the second because writing formatted text is not what they are good at and they don’t in any case allow you to insert images directly into the text.

That leaves an amorphous group of apps designed for keeping “notes”. MS OneNote and Evernote are well known examples. Despite their apparent similarities they vary greatly from one another, some so simple as to be the electronic equivalent of a piece of paper and others so complex and replete with features as to require a stiff learning curve to familiarise oneself with their operation. Some are single user and others are accessible by groups of users.

Then there is cost. Some are free, some have to be paid for and still others are “freemium”, offering a free version and a paid-for premium version.

The paid-for versions pose the problem that if I pay and then find the app not to my taste, I have wasted my money. I therefore concentrated on the free and freemium apps.

I won’t bore you with an account of the apps I tried and rejected. I will cut to the chase and describe the one I am currently trying out.

I have tried this app several times before and always ended up by deleting it. Moreover, it is a freemium app which means that many of the best features are reserved for paying customers. Unfortunately, where payment is concerned, it follows the insidious trend set by the likes of Adobe and Microsoft: you cannot buy the app outright but have to “subscribe”, paying a monthly or annual fee for as long as you use the product. This may make sense for corporate users who may need ongoing support, but for individual users the cost is too great. Fortunately, there are now often alternatives to the big name applications, many of them completely free.

Anyway, back to the main story. The app whose use I have been avoiding but am now trying out is Bear. It has versions for Mac computers and for the iPad and iPhone but not for Windows.

Does it meet my requirement to insert images and to copy these across to WordPress? Yes, it does. (It has two ways if doing this, about which more later.)

Does it have italic and bold and does it copy these across to WordPress? Yes, it does but there is a nuance here that I need to explain.

Ever since computers began to be used to handle and display text, various coding systems have been invented which instruct the computer, via an interpreter, how exactly to display the text. The one most people are familiar with, whether they have used it themselves or not, is HTML. This remains the most widely used but there is now a new kid on the block called Markdown.

Markdown consists of relatively simple symbols that writers can use to format their text on the computer. Because the symbols are so simple, they clutter up the text far less than HTML does, so that it remains more readable and it is easier to spot errors. Moreover, if you mark a string as italic, say, then it appears as italic in the Markdown editor, unlike with HTML where it remains unchanged until displayed on the computer.

Many “notes” apps work with both plain text and Markdown encoded text. WordPress now understands Markdown which is a sign that this system has reached the mainstream.

I mention this because Bear can be switched to Markdown mode and it is this that enables it to do useful things like style text strings as italic and bold.

Briefly, to mark a string as italic, you enclose it in a pair of asterisks and to mark a string as bold, you enclose it in a double pair of asterisks. When you copy the text to WordPress, the asterisks disappear, leaving the string appropriately styled.

As mentioned, there are two ways to transfer the finished post to WordPress. The first is to use the “share” function, choosing the WordPress app as the destination, and the second is to copy the text in Bear and paste it into the WordPress editor. Each has advantages and disadvantages. (Isn’t that always the way of things…?)

If I use “share”, the text appears in the WordPress editor correctly formatted – even the title is placed in the right position. However, there is a problem. While I can edit text, I cannot edit images. The only choices are to leave an image as it is or delete it.

Why does this matter? Well, for one thing because I like to centre my images and instructions to do so can only be given in the WordPress editor, not in Bear. If I use “share”, then, I have to publish the article and post-edit it. I would obviously prefer to post only when the text is perfect.

If I copy and paste, I have to take care of placing the title myself and the resulting text does not look as it will when published. On the other hand, because I am in the WordPress editor, I can go through the post, centring the images.

This probably means that if I write a post entirely in text without images (like this one), I will use “share” but if the post contains images, I will have to use copy and paste.

Or perhaps I shall make a felicitous discovery of an app that does everything I want in exactly the way I want. No, I don’t think so, either. Life is all about making compromises and no doubt always will be.

In the meantime, I will give Bear a good run for its money and see whether it deserves its role as my main editor.