Looking back - and a new beginning

This is the time of year when people reflect on what has gone on over the past year, decade, century or more. It's also a time to eagerly look forward to the future.

Today I've been thinking about this day in 1988 when I received the very, very first copy of Flutewise. It was quite a moment, especially as the copy that was delivered to me had a huge mistake - some red ink had not been printed on two pages! I was mortified. I phoned a good friend in publishing, Simon Hunt, who very calmly told me to stop worrying, it would be fine - and of course it was.

In those early days Flutewise was put together in what would be considered a bizarre way today, cut and paste. It's the sort of method you'd expect to do in primary school, but it was quite the norm then. The articles would be typed out and then printed. Drawings were preferred to photos as photos were so expensive to reproduce. Once the words and pictures were ready they were literally cut out and pasted with Pritt stick into place. Then a film was made of it before printing. It was slow and the results were not really that good. But everyone loved Flutewise from the start. And so I've continued for coming up to 22 years. Are you impressed?

It's often been very hard work, but most of the time it has been great fun. For sometime now though we've been thinking we should change things. From New Year we are. We've got an exciting new website. The few people who've seen it have said, 'It's amazing', 'Not what I expected', 'Wonderful'. I'm really proud of Andy for what he has achieved, it has been a mammoth task that has taken a very long time, but I think it will be well worth it. We've a few tiny problems to sort out and then it will go live, probably tomorrow. So you can come back and check and find out how you register to use it.

It seems timely that the new site should be launched now, 22 years after the first magazine. Times have changed and are changing.

Happy New Year!