Post-Christmas at No. 56

Finally we caught up meteorologically with Marja-Leena. But only lightly and only, I suspect, briefly. But enough to disguise the fact that the garden looks like a junk-heap without the white dusting.

But all is not what it seems. The top picture has been Photoshopped. Cropped, of course, but also the recipient of Healing Brush Tool. As a result the washing line that runs right to left above the fence has disappeared. So too has the ugly street lamp which dominates pix taken from this angle.

Just in case anyone was in any doubt, the ducks are made of a stonish sort of substance. The bottles – minus two still in the utility room – represent the household’s consumption since December 26 (Boxing Day).

Probably worth waiting for

My non-proselytising atheism was under siege last night.

I had just paid my TV licence (£139) online and, yet again, BBC4 justified the expenditure. “How to build a cathedral” started in the Middle Ages when England was a building site devoted to fifteen great cathedrals, intended to create heaven on earth, an aspiration not as silly as it sounds. Some jobs were signed off in a mere sixty years. But when the money ran out it could take two hundred.

Dense technical detail interwoven with vivid upward-looking photography covered the progression from Romanesque (circle section arches) to Gothic (pointed arches) as master masons sought to reduce wall bulk, increase window area and let in more and more light. Some end-products are virtually skeletal, made even more delicate by such ingenuities as fan vaults (the inset is Ely). “The master masons deserve a place alongside Shakespeare and Turner,” said the presenter. That too wasn’t as silly as it sounds.

Sometimes things went wrong. But instead of inveighing against Jehovian whimsy when a tower collapsed the church took the opportunity to order a replacement even more elaborate and employing more recent structural techniques. Flying buttresses, for instance, de-stressed the walls but became another concentration of elegance in the process. No cathedral presently resembles its earliest finished state; all have been tinkered with, no doubt to a chorus of “Vandallyze nott our hovse of Godde”.

To me they are magnificent works of art. But I can appreciate how, if I were a Christian, I might look at them and feel smug.

Low-fi can be bad for health

Here’s a techno-disaster which met its original aim but left me diminished.

In the early sixties I was poor and living in expensive London. Inevitably I was condemned to a record player rather than hi-fi separates. The tiny loudspeaker reacted to certain mid-range horn notes from a Dennis Brain LP with a frying noise which drove me mad. I decided to build a wooden enclosure as host to a proper 10 in. Goodmans speaker.

The enclosure was a metre wide which required a lot of chipboard and the insertion of many 2½-in. screws. At least I pre-drilled the screwholes but parsimony restricted me to the widest bit that came with the drill. It wasn’t wide enough and I compensated with much muscular screw-drivering.

When do you decide that a progressively painful activity has become unbearable? The palm of my hand reddened, became sore, became blistered, became burst-blistered, became raw meat. I soldiered on driven, as always with DIY projects, by a desire to see the job finished. The pain became a pink mist. Afterwards the speaker system worked well but the evidence of my self-harm endured for almost a year. No one to blame but myself.

Moral 1: Ignore my counsel regarding DIY.
Moral 2: This may be sexist but I can’t imagine any woman of my acquaintance having to make a similar confession.

MOTORBIKE QUERY On a fastish bike the hands are the most thermally vulnerable part of the body. I never solved this. Has the passage of time and improved technology provided an answer?

Incompetence rapidly rewarded

Being theoretical rather than practical I have initiated many techno-disasters. This was the most spectacular.

Years ago (“the often times” – as my daughter says) one fuelled a two-stroke motorbike by pouring first petrol then oil into the tank then agitating the bike to mix the two. Frequently neat oil got into the carburettor, snuffing out the engine. That meant stripping the carb and cleaning it.

This happened with my 125 cc BSA Bantam, and I carelessly reassembled the carb so that the slide was at the top of its action not the bottom – leaving the throttle wide open. When kickstarted the engine whined immediately to maximum revs. How to stop it? No ignition, of course, and the twistgrip was inoperative.

So I reached for the high tension lead feeding the sparking plug and wrenched it free. But there were many many volts emerging from that lead and I was thrown across the backyard and crashed into the dividing wall. Painful. I will continue to shrive myself in a continuing if intermittent series on other such disasters.

TECHNO-MUSIC AT CHRISTMAS
For he is like a refiner’s fire. Messiah.

Das sehn wir auch den Rädern ab…
Die gar nicht gerne stille stehn...

Die Steine selbst, so schwer sie sind…
Sie tanzen mit den muntern Reihn,
Und wollen gar noch schneller sein...

(We see this also with the wheels…
They don't like to stand still...

The stones themselves, heavy though they are…
They join in the cheerful dance,
And want to go yet faster...) Die schöne Müllerin.

Without whom it would have been...

Each year my wife and daughter visit the Christmas market in a different German city. This year it was Hamburg. The village is the result of five or six years’ purchases; I stayed at home and made the tray thing.
HAPPY HOLIDAY EVERYONE.

My blog is not yet a year old. The subject matter (and probably its execution) meant it was never likely to be be Top of the Pops but the dialogues have delighted me. So here’s a few virtual Oscars.

Plutarch Introduced me to blogging, thereby extending a conversation which began in 1963.
Lucy Teased me into setting up on my own, then effortlessly (ie, hiding any traces of effort) showed me how it was done.
Marja-Leena From the far side of the world mixed art with technology. Flatteringly believes Brits are from time to time intentionally amusing!
Relucent Reader Found my blog via shared interest in Charles Ives and rated my piece on electricity “clear and concise”. Bibliophile; has driven tanks.
Julia Designed websites, plays piano, rendered Prague’s graffiti world famous and confided an outstanding admission which led Lucy to describe her as “a woman of parts”.
Avus His vehicular and other interests no longer move in parallel to mine but seem likely to intersect (Will we collide?).
Zhoen Admirably tight-lipped comment, searing personal revelations and vivid reminders of what it is like to work in a hospital – not that I ever did but I’m married to a retired SRN.
Herhimnbryn On the other other side of the world. Gradually providing reasons for my previously unexplained enthusiasm for Perth.

There are others but they must labour under the banner of The Usual Suspects. Here’s to further internationalism.

Switching off Coronation St ain't cute

Trawling Herhimnbryn’s blog about life in Perth, WA, I came upon a photo of possums sitting on a telly aerial. Of the commenters who referred to their cuteness it’s unlikely any came from New Zealand.

Here’s a baby possum from the Golden Bay area of NZ’s South Island. On three trips to NZ this is the only one we ever saw alive. The others had been reduced to poignant layers of fluff by car tyres and most Kiwis wouldn’t have it any other way. Possums were introduced into NZ as a solution to some vermin problem, long forgotten. It’s the possums who are now the problem.

Apart from the disruptions they cause in houses they like to climb up power-line poles and create a low-resistance path between the insulators. As a result electricity may be blotted out over very large rural areas. To prevent this metal collars are attached to thousands (millions?) of utility poles. NZ is not a rich country and providing these collars prevents expenditure on raising the efficiency of the All Black rugby team

FAUX-SMELLY LAV (see December 17). Sir Hugh wanted to know how we eradicated the carpet smell. I’d forgotten and had to check out the technology. An application of Spray ‘n’ Vac followed by a quick pass with the Dyson. Several times. Bit of an anti-climax really.

Oh, the stigma. Ah, the eeease

All my cars bar one have been what Americans – with admirable directness – call stick-shifts. Initially I had no option, the alternative was too expensive. Later, sharing a deep-seated prejudice with many other Brits, I rejected automatics on the grounds they were somehow louche. My penultimate car, a six-speed manual gearbox Lexus, was the most satisfying I have ever owned.

So why for the last two-and-a-half years have I owned an automatic? To encrusted types the answer is brief: it’s an old man’s car. But an equally truthful response might have been: I like the technology. I need only flick the drive selector a few centimetres towards the passenger and it becomes a manual gear-change, albeit without the need for a clutch pedal. The first car to offer that system I know of was a Porsche and it probably cost zillions. My present car is not a Porsche.

Take a trip inside the gearbox and there are more wonders. Traditional automatic gearboxes (called slushpumps in America), consist of two opposing but separate propellors linked by surrounding fluid. Such systems are wasteful of energy. Fine if you have bhp to spare, as most Americans cars have. Less so with European and Japanese hatchbacks.

But my car has a truly automatic gearbox. It incorporates two clutches, one for the odd-numbered gears, one for the evens. As a driver I remain blissfully ignorant of their function as they help change the six gears in milliseconds. Oh, I almost forgot: my present car cost two-thirds the price of the Lexus. More later about its remarkable engine.

Here's to my infallible nose

The previous post here dealt with house re-wiring and subsequent comments raised the subject of its legality when done by an amateur. Rather than appear to endorse the practice I pressed Delete. My thanks to Plutarch, Zhoen and Marja-Leena who responded and whose comments I have also deleted.

MORE CULPA MEA It seems only fair to replace it with another story where I ended up with egg on my face. So let’s start with my sense of smell and its sibling, taste. Both are well enough developed to identify why I dislike Beaujolais and certain red Loire wines (the Gamay grape), to predict the inherent disappointment in many petit chateau Bordeaux (excessive tannin) and to celebrate the emergence of the pinot noir all over the world without for a moment confusing it with the grape’s greatest expression in Burgundy.

But the application of smell/taste frequently depends on context. And pride, as they say…. A few days after we moved into our present house we discovered an unpleasant smell in the bathroom, seemingly coming from the toilet. The builder’s jack-of-all-trades was called in, used putty to seal the toilet/sewer junction and performed other stabs in the dark. The smell remained.

My daughter phoned and I mentioned the problem. What about the recently laid carpet? she said. Couldn’t be that I said; it’s something to do with poo. But once the phone was back in the cradle I stole upstairs and bent low. It was the carpet! The toilet (It’s so easy to give a toilet a bad name.) was blameless. And I felt like a complete prat.

Use 'em but don't love 'em

A dictionary’s most important quality? It must be accessible. If the explanation’s more than an arm’s-length away the word isn’t checked. Chambers is housed downstairs in the living room, Penguin here on a shelf over the scanner. Collins-Robert lies on the same shelf above the monitor.

Both are heavy to lift down and I’d prefer them to hover on either side of my head at temple height.

Foreign dictionaries need replacing. That’s the fourth or fifth Collins-Robert in two decades. The paperback French-French Dictionnaire Universel cost €2 off a market stall. It claims 40,000 definitions which I doubt but it’s mainly for emergencies such as discussing swimming pool filtration systems.

Dictionaries are systems rather than books and typography plays a vital role. The defined word in Penguin appears in an extra-bold sans serif face with the definition in a serif face, possibly Times New Roman; similarly with Collins-Robert. But the presentation differs radically. A long entry in the former (eg, “be”) occupies only half a column, in the latter “etre” covers a page. Penguin is initially clearer but C-R gathers useful related information into a single area.

Never become sentimentally attached to a dictionary. None is perfect and the faults can be infuriating. To be told (by C-R) that raki is raki is only a tiny step forward. On the other hand being laconic is a virtue. Penguin says an “erk” is a person holding the lowest rank in the air force (short for aircraftsman). As an ex-erk I didn’t know that.

Hiding behind a Gallic veil

Avus suggests a meme-like thingie in that we all post photos of our bookshelves. Rather than reveal the literary poverty of mine, I am relying on subterfuge.

On a loué une villa languedocienne pour deux semaines pendant Juin. Mais tous les couteaux de la cuisine étaient émoussés. Bonne opportunité pour m’enfoncer dans le soupe linguistique francais.

Parmi les étagères poussiéreuse de Monsieur Bricolage – car c’est un vrai bricolage à Lodève avec beaucoup de marchandises dont on ne reconnait pas le fonction – j’ai trouvé un jeune homme en sueur, portant une chemise et cravate, qui était evidemment pas en vacances.

Avant commencer parler je cherchais pour le témoignage d’une intelligence sur sa figure - parce que, manquant un mot important, je ne voulais pas d’abord commander quelque chose mais lui poser une devinette. Rassuré, j’ai dit: “Monsieur je cherche un truc pour rendre le lame d’un couteau plus efficace.” Ses cils se tricotaient pour un moment et puis – Boum! – le visage s’est epanuyé. Il me tirait par le main jusqu’à l’étagère le plus poussiéreuse. “Voila, monsieur, un aiguisoir!”

J’aime la France et avec des stratagèms comme ca je peux démontrer mes remerciements à ce beau pays. Arriver au mot exact après avoir recu le définition fait – pour un francais – le preuve qu’il est intellectuel. Ou, au moins, plus intellectuel qu’un anglais. Voici mon role en France.

Welcome to my non-blogging world

My wife cooks the meals, I am le plongeur. It isn’t a fair division of labour, I know, and very occasionally I split and clean a leek. Otherwise I bring scientific method and cutting-edge equipment to the kitchen sink.

BRUSH My preferred tool even for plates, but especially after a pasta meal when the fork tines are clogged with parmesan which has undergone molecular change. Such brushes must be regarded as consumables. When the bristles begin to curl – however slightly – replace. In fact if you take washing-up seriously, buy in bulk.

SCRITCHERS Two types: sponge-backed and fake silvery metal. The latter is the more abrasive. Scritchers for me are a last resort. I prefer to soak and brush. NOTE: soaking should never be a ploy to avoid tackling a difficult pan; the plongeur who practices this delaying tactic loses all professional credibility.

RACK Stainless steel. Don’t be tempted by wood, the first step towards catching Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

DISH-TOWEL Is it damp? Of course it’s damp! Chuck it into the Bosch. Minimum requirement for a household of two: two to three dozen.

WASHING-UP LIQUID Green only.

WATER TEMPERATURE Should be unbearable.

HIGHER TECHNOLOGY? Under the kitchen work-surface sits Monsieur Ariston. He and I have no relationship. My daughter tickles his fancy when she visits.

All that glisters is not good

Last week BBC4 showed two French-made Maigret films starring Bruno Cremer. Since they sought to re-create the fifties/sixties I was on the lookout for the Shiny Car Syndrome. Not my invention, I’m afraid, but I’ve happily adopted it. Here it is: Cars are important in setting a film’s period. But since the only, say, 1927 Lagondas are now in the hands of enthusiasts, have been cherished and are worth a mint, they will appear in the film as unnaturally groomed. Too glossy to be workaday.

And not just cars. Beautifully blocked trilbies, Art Décor funiture, horse-drawn carriages. Not a scratch anywhere, causing these artefacts to stand out prominently instead of melting into the background as they should.

The Maigret films did not suffer from too much shininess, possibly because there are people still driving blancmange-mould Panhards and traction avant Citroens in France and the cars may be borrowed for a few packets of Gitanes. Maigret’s office didn’t look lived-in but that was OK, he wasn’t one for staying at his desk. However I query the horribly neat, seemingly anachronistic, filing system that occupied one wall because he wasn’t a one for filing either.

TECHNO-ANTIPATHY Not secateurs themselves but the switch which locks the blades. If you’re wearing heavy protective gloves it’s far too easy to brush the knob and bring cutting to a standstill, delaying the completion of a gardening job which – surprise, surprise - I already find intolerable.

Molecular magic in the kitchen

The good news is I beat my best time for swimming a mile by over 1½ minutes – a huge improvement. The bad news is I am Samson shorn of his hair. In a word, knackered. So here’s something gentle and speculative: cooking as chemistry.

By which I mean combining flavoured constituents to create a new flavour and, ideally, an end-product in which the constituents are no longer visibly evident. A cake is a perfect example (reflect on how unpleasant it would be to eat the constituents individually) whereas a stew falls short. Application of heat is probably assumed.

But perhaps such fusion becomes more magical when it involves the smallest number of ingredients. Hollandaise sauce consists only of butter and egg yoke plus a dash of lemon juice or vinegar. Just as vital are patience and slow heating. Yet I see this as being closer to the biogenetics lab than the kitchen. Diverge from the rules and the sauce is not spoiled, it becomes something else: a bastard form of scrambled egg.

From my limited experience, making hollandaise is Three Toques (Raymond Blanc’s grading of culinary severity) and I never aspired to that. I have made soup – and blogged about it – and it met the above premises. I also discovered, off my own bat, that an ingredient too far precludes fusion. Add Lea & Perrins and the rest of the soup simply becomes a background for that very opinionated product.

Question: bacon and eggs are made for each other yet – assuming they are eaten together – do they fuse? There’s a new texture but is there a new flavour?

For a fascinating food list click on Relucent Reader's latest

More on the mythical(?) toy divide

Yesterday’s post on toys was triggered by the news that the inventer of Slinky had died. Is Slinky a toy? More of an engineering exercise to prove a principle in mechanics. Similar to that wooden bird that dipped its beak into a glass of water, stopped, then resumed. That proved something or other but nobody ever told me what.

My elder daughter, a teacher’s assistant specialising in science, admits to playing with Slinkies and adds, somewhat dubiously, “they are good for demonstrating waves”. Remembering she was greatly attached in her youth to a shapeless, knitted creature called Fub I asked her what her favourite toy was. She responded: “I loved that garden thing that I had - you would never be able to market it now because the little tool thing was lethal.” I have no idea what this could have been.

In raising the girls’ toys/boys’ toys bifurcation it now occurs to me that small children do not initially demand toys, but are given what seems appropriate by their parents. Obviously this is not the moment for handing over a 00-gauge model of The Flying Scotsman. Suckability rather than realism is likely to be the overriding parameter.

More soft toys may go to young girls rather than young boys but something odd happens as the years go by. Men of all ages admit to an attachment to teddy bears. In the case of Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited the attachment is perhaps self-explanatory. In other instances less so. A late life reaction to being given an air-gun at a vulnerable age?

As far as I know I have no latent teddy tendencies but I must confess to enjoying a walk round Hamlyn’s on visits to London.

Are toy choices hard-wired?

From us, for Christmas, grandson Zach will get a Bob the Builder talking tool bench and helmet, plus the optional toolkit. I know… but you’re wrong. I had nothing to do with a decision cooked up between my wife and my daughter.

Nor do I know what a talking tool bench will say. However this bizarre present has set me thinking about how children perceive the real world and how they express this perception via their preference in toys. My toy-receiving years neatly coincided with WW2 when the few toys available were made of wood or lead. An alternative was something second-hand. I well remember disdaining a pitifully crude wooden Spitfire in preference for a used Dinkey toy. Why? Because the latter looked more realistic.

Later it was all change. As one of three brothers I found myself father of two daughters. I was adrift, faced with Barbie dolls and such. Barbie wasn’t realistic, though a model kitchen stove, bought later, was. But was the stove played with, did it appeal? I can’t remember. The situation became more blurred when my younger daughter developed a crush on the late F1 driver, Gilles Villeneuve, and requested a series of ever more authentic model Ferraris.

Given the way my life evolved it’s perhaps not surprising I wanted realistic toys. And perhaps this is a lad’s thing. Many young girls seem to prefer soft toys. Is this a girl’s thing? But is a doll’s house – a phase many girls pass through - a step towards realism?

For the record my other grandson, Ian, aged 24, has asked for a subscription to New Scientist but I think we can safely say he passed the floppy bunny vs. remote control helicopter dilemma some years ago.

Dear dead Dos dreams

In the High and Far-Off Times, the PC, O Best Beloved, had no mouse. It had only a Keyboard… I can’t keep up with Kipling but you get the idea. This was aeons ago. This was the age of Dos when today’s careless texters and wilful misspellers would have been required to bend the knee to the computer’s rigours rather than the other way round.

Say you had a file called Teacup in a folder called Saucer and you wanted to copy it to another folder called Milkjug. On a blank screen devoid of pretty icons you typed something (age has affected my memory) like this:
C/>: copy: /Saucer/Teacup/: /Milkjug/
And if you didn’t get it exactly right nothing happened.

Windows plus a mouse meant any fool could drag and drop but the advantages weren’t immediately apparent. When told about Word for Windows I remember asking: why complicate a typing procedure by breaking off to use a mouse?

A computer running on Dos was like an Austin 7. Repairs and maintenance were within anyone’s grasp. You could tinker with the central cortex by rearranging the autoexec/bat file, causing the PC to boot up differently. You could penetrate the hard disk and alter the way programs appeared on the screen.

My favourite game was Columns, a childish version of Tetris. When I changed to a slightly faster computer I realised I would never match my earlier scores because Columns too was now faster. So I found the score box on the hard disk, deleted the old figures and started again. I was Master of the Universe.

But it didn’t last.

Were you looking for this?

Essential news for technologians:

TALKING SAW Sensor in blade detects absence of pencil marks on wood, triggering recorded message: “You’re deviating, you’re deviating.” (Japanese accent optional).

NEW CE RATING Die-stamped symbol (labrador rampant) indicates approval by Le Laboratoire Culinaire de Bretagne. Applies to small kitchen utensils.

ITEM FROM AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL GIFT CATALOGUE Portable transmitter causes hologram of Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward, reciting extracts from De Profundis, to dance tango on car bonnet of Richard Littlejohn. (US model note: For Richard Littlejohn read Rush Limbaugh, for bonnet read hood.)

SARKOZY TEMPTS ANGLO TOURISTS A bill just issued by the Elysée will force all French supermarkets to erect a 50 m high mast carrying illuminated sign visible for 5 km, “Closed for LONG lunch break”.

WHICH? EASES SHOPPING Polymicroancrylinate glove increases finger-tip sensitivity allowing shoppers to check ripeness of melons, soft spots on apples, cracks in egg-shells (without opening box) and tastelessness of prepared meals. Not suitable for use on humans.

FROM HEREFORD WINE LOVERS SOCIETY New gadget combines essential features of gas chromatograph and allows potential buyer to check whether wine is corked without need to open bottle. One member says: “Saved me thousands in one year”.

POLYGRAPH DEVELOPMENTS After British MPs rejected being attached to a conventional lie-detector during Newsnight interviews (“undermines the dignity of the Mother Of Parliaments”), the manufacturer has designed a variant which flags up Hasn’t answered the question. PM Gordon Brown orders an enquiry.

Type setter's toast; presses still roar

During a professional low tide I wearied of giving space on MotorCycling’s letter page to readers celebrating the Golden Age of British Bikes. Disapproving of many models cited I inserted a fake letter decrying this tendency, adding “nostalgia is a suspect emotion”. The foam-flecked response was gratifying. Yet here I am being just as nostalgic.

But not about badly engineered bikes with total-loss oil systems. Rather the mechanisms of publishing. This is a Linotype which set type in the hot-metal days. Press a keyboard key and a brass mould (for a letter, a number, a punctuation mark or a space) came tinkling out of the large box on top. Repeat this until sufficient moulds for a line of type assemble themselves in the machine’s bowels.

Work another control and molten type-metal from the Linotype’s small furnace – Just imagine it! – flows into the moulds to cast that one line of type. Start again. A newspaper might well own two dozen such machines, tinkling away and smelling like… well, over to Proust. Now my humdrum computer can do the same job and I haven’t seen a Linotype for thirty years.

One mechanism still remains. To print many newspapers in next to no time you need a press. And a Heidelberg, a Hoe or a Crabtree in full flight (and full throat) resembles open warfare. The power of the press indeed, all directed towards an ephemeral product with a life-span often measured in minutes. The newspapers I worked on were printed in a Bradford street called Hall Ings and the soles of my feet twitch sympathetically down the years as I remember the roar and vibration of those majestic machines.

Christmas wish list

Technology to improve all our lives:

● Force field that levitates certain objects (china, books with bookmarks, hi-fi knobs) when anyone under age of five enters living room.

● Additive for milk and milk-based dishes to prevent skin forming.

● Lavatory brush that…. sorry, can’t complete this one.

● Wine-glasses that change shape from slender (white) to wide (red) and wash themselves while user remains prone on the couch.

● Bath plug flexible enough to seal the ‘ole but strong enough to withstand removal.

● Display panel at rear of car for touring in France. Lights up with – what else? - Trop proche!

● Quarantine flag, indicating outbreak of cholera, for use when queueing at airport check-ins.

● Auto-censor for TV news bulletins. Deletes user-selected expressions (eg, “The England soccer team hopes…”, “billions”, “trillions”.)

● Standardised supermarket checkout card reader with label: Insert here (50 pt Dayglow yellow type) this way round (with picture).

To be continued

A sort of secular prayer

POST NUMBER 150. Try something different.

Each Tuesday and Thursday I swim 90 lengths of an 18 m pool, just slightly more than a mile. This takes about 49 minutes. Because I swim crawl my face is mostly submerged and the non-aqueous world is glimpsed only in two-second bursts while taking on air. Otherwise I commune with tile patterns suffused pale blue, the roar of breath exhaled underwater and the passage of numbers through my mind. Those numbers are gathered into sets.

Lengths 1 to 11. Sense of burden and a need to struggle out of single numbers; 10 lengths is pseudo-single-number; 11 marks first real – albeit minor - achievement.
Lengths 12 to 22. Dog days. Length 15 is 1/6th of total but passes uncelebrated.
Length 22 and a bit. Quarter distance. Fraction makes it messy. Uncelebrated.
Lengths 23 – 30. One-third distance. Worthwhile milestone but must avoid thinking about 60 lengths that remain.
Lengths 31 – 45. Long haul, preferably done mindlessly. Halfway there.
Length 46. Vital number! Future now smaller than past.
Lengths 47 – 60. Sense of swimming downhill. Mild exhilaration. Glance sideways at other swimmers doing breast-stroke, head out of the water. Accelerate and blast past.
Lengths 61 – 90. Each length increases laddish tendencies. Legs kick frothily, turns become flashier. Finally, climb out of pool, careful not to breathe hard, off to changing room without a backward glance.

NOTE: Frequent flashes of terror that lengths have been miscounted are quite normal.

Now, the computer does the measuring

Pretty boring photo, I’m afraid. Perhaps that’s forgivable since it’s here for sentimental reasons.

The millimetric scale on the right suggests it’s a ruler. However the units on the left won’t be familiar to everyone for this is an em-rule used in an activity that has almost disappeared. Twenty-five years ago, if you wanted to lay out a page design for a magazine or a newspaper you cut up galley-proofs with a pair of scissors and glued them to a large sheet of paper. The stone-hand or clicker at the printer’s used this to create the design for real with cast metal type. Now the designer creates a virtual page on a computer screen and sends the result over the wires in file form.

Printing employs some of the most wilfully obscure units outside pharmacology. Typeface heights come in points and there are a handy 72 of them to the inch. Theoretically column widths could be similarly measured but because this would lead to large figures ems (equivalent to 12 points) are preferred. These archaic units are retained on DTP software and elsewhere on computers because printing is nothing if not conservative.

When computer design became widely available I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. Now, with a perversity born out of wishes granted, I have sentimental (if not practical) regrets. Print-shops were smelly, dirty, esoteric places filled with ex-apprentice craftsmen who shared a journalist’s desire to put ink on paper. I enjoyed their company. The em-rule is a memorial to that friendship.

Stays a must when boarding

My brother was bringing Takista into a slotted berth at the – which? – marina. Say Ile de Ré, it’s such a smashing name. My job was twofold. To jump on to the pontoon and prevent the bows from hitting the rear of the berth. Then, using a line attached to the boat, tie on to a mooring cleat.

Ashore a French lad looked up questioningly. I nodded and it was he who protected the bows. When I joined him to tie on he gestured, Un joli bateau. He was right. Built for racing, and somewhat cramped below, Takista was sleek and purposeful. Here she is at St-Jean-de-Luz and the photo reminds me of when I first boarded her. No doors, as with a car. How do you “get on” a boat?

First, don’t grab the guard-rail. It prevents people going into the sea but it’s not intended to withstand the pull of someone climbing aboard. Search out the metal cables, called stays, running to the top of the mast from the edge of the deck amidships. These, duplicated at the other side of the boat, hold the mast up and are strong enough to pull on.

Other stays, forward and aft, do the same job and are your good friends at sea. Leaving Cap Breton Takista emerged into shallow water over which poured a tide race which corkscrewed the boat alarmingly. I’d gone aft to stow a fender in the lazaret (Yes, yes, I love the jargon) and wanted to return to the cockpit two metres away. Impossible. So I stood up, took hold of the backstay, feeling safe and relaxed enough to enjoy watching Takista’s pirouettes.

In those days equipment did the selling

Machinery is only one aspect of technology but I wonder if a coffee roaster I saw in the late forties in my home town, Bradford, was the first device to awaken my interest in things that did things. Mind you, it wasn’t the roaster’s raison d’etre that attracted attention. Its ostentatious manufacture, its flamboyant operation, the way it was displayed and its delectable byproducts meant it was unignorable.

The inset gives some hints but this machine is smaller and more utilitarian. The Bradford roaster had a cast-iron chassis with the name (alas now forgotten) standing out in relief. The chassis had something in common with clothes wringers dating back to the previous century, and was painted in brilliant red and green.

Even at rest it looked impressive. When working, flames licking round the huge central drum that held the beans made it look like an industrial accident. My wife says something similar still functioned in the seventies in Kingston-upon-Thames but, not surprisingly, the HSE had suppressed the flames.

With an asset like this marketing instincts (long before the principles of marketing were articulated) had it positioned in the shop’s front window. Wow! But of course there was another powerful positive, and the olfactory products of roasting were allowed to escape into the street. This at a time when probably nine out of ten Bradfordians drank tea.

To tell the truth I didn’t really understand what it did since my apostasy from tea was a year or two away. But it worked in the way a firework display works. And I can see and smell it now.

Like a crystal ball, but more reliable

Having emerged from re-reading A la recherche… I needed a change of pace. James Lee Burke’s Cadillac Jukebox got me back to modern times which now resume with The Drunkard’s Walk or “How randomness rules our lives”.

This is not a clone of Eats Shoots and Leaves. It’s by a professor (Leonard Moldinov) and it explains the mathematics of probability and statistics. If you can add up you’re OK. Even readers of average curiosity should be interested because here mathematics solves what most lay people would regard as the impossible.

As well as illustrating the penalties for getting it wrong. The author was told by his GP that the chances were 999 out of 1000 he would be dead within the decade. This followed a blood test taken for a life insurance application. On a hunch the author had taken an HIV test and it came back positive. But his doctor “had confused the chances that I would test positive if I was not HIV-positive with the chances that I would not be HIV-positive if I tested positive.” With probability the words are as important as the figures.

Even given more than my self-imposed limit of 300 words I would risk traducing Moldinov’s carefully-worded prose. So read the book. The style is lively and non-technical and the examples are interesting (The somewhat maligned baseball player Roger Maris is sympathetically analysed). The examples include the mathematical side of coin tossing (with an empirical proof – new to me) and dice throwing, perversity in the face of overwhelming evidence, the danger of judging ability by short-term results and the fact that so-called “random”numbers are biased towards the lower digits.

Well-reviewed in The Guardian.

Look on my works ye mighty, and despair

To post one’s face or not? Plutarch recently came out full frontal, others disclose only a carefully chosen part. With herhimnbryn it’s ankles and feet clad in multi-coloured stockings, while Rosie provocatively offers an ear lobe plus pendant.

I belong to the obscurantists since I doubt even my wife could honestly identify me as the marine creature here on the dashboard. Two or three months ago I posted a slightly more recognisable photo in context with a different subject and it drew no comments whatsoever. I took the hint.

In any case with B. Bonden Esq it’s la technologie c’est moi. That’s why I’m aping The Observer series on writers’ workplaces and providing a view of the hardware I surround myself with. Perhaps those who are shy about their faces will be more forthcoming about their digital pulpits.

The deep kitchen table came from Ikea for I cannot stand being cramped. At the far end the colour printer is encircled with a modified plastic crate on top of which stands the scanner. A wireless router and Skype impedimenta crown the computer. Apart from a few techno-manuals the books are French, mainly novels. The upper shelves support my collection of forklifts, souvenirs of my life as editor of a logistics magazine.

From the window I can see the tower of Hereford cathedral.

No such thing as a free leap forward

A post with the same first para appeared yesterday. The post sought to be funny but wasn’t. So the idea is here recycled.

We’d just finished with Siegfried Idyll and were about to hear Four Last Songs. But, as a sort of entr’acte, came the tinkle of a mobile phone. The acoustics of Birmingham’s Symphony Hall are so good I was able to identify the culprit immediately and watch his panicky scrabbling.

When mobiles first impinged on our family I recall someone saying this was how all phones should be. No more naked dashes from bathroom to hallway, no more trudges from one vandalised, urine-smelling cavity to another, no more running out of change. What we didn’t foresee is there would be a price to pay and the unfortunate Birmingham concert-goer was paying it. Perpetual connectedness comes at the risk of public humiliation.

My brother paid a variant of this price. He went to a concert and switched his phone off. Halfway through he began to have his doubts about this but the phone was in a bag and getting to it would have caused much disturbance. The concert was blotted out by his subsequent agonies.

I pay a different price. I cannot trust batteries. So my mobile is always turned off and only used when I make the briefest of calls. I’m a candidate for half a phone but none is available.

And there’s an even heavier price. Mobiles are ideal for triggering car bombs remotely. Not exactly an unalloyed benefit to mankind as the phoner (above) appears to realise.

Does techno discourage viewers?

Judged by the aims of this blog Flight of the Phoenix is a movie that got it wrong. But see what you think.

A twin-boom plane (that's one in the inset), carrying a mish-mash of cardboard characters, crashes in the Gobi desert. Because one passenger can design planes and because there’s a cargo of manufacturing tools, the cast fashions a new aircraft based on one of the booms which is flown away into the sunset. FotP is a remake of one starring James Stewart which I saw and have forgotten. Except that it wasn’t this tedious and predictable.

The premise of amateurs building a plane is unlikely but, hey, let’s give it a go. But the movie makers didn’t. The techno-stuff is mostly unexplained and pushed into the background. Instead there are sub-plots about warring tribesmen, who’s stealing “the precious fluid” (water), personality clashes, and the rest of the nonsense by which Tarzan films were blown out to full length.

It’s my belief that if they’d stuck mainly to the re-building the movie would have been better. Even those with no real interest in technology could have responded to a story which laid out the problems and explained how they were resolved. “Caper” crime stories follow this route; so did Dambusters. But the makers had no faith in that, an opportunity was missed and a string of clichés ensued.

I am not transfixed by technology. It’s only one of my interests and I chose it simply as a way of imposing self-discipline for a blog. However I believe an intelligent “How to…” approach can be entertaining, even in fiction. Or am I over-estimating the movie-going public?

Experienced velcro user needed

Retirement meant donating my suits to Oxfam and sloughing (sluffing?) it in grubby chinos and open-necked shirts. It also meant disdaining shoes that need polishing and opting for trainers. One advantage of this tatterdemalion outfit is I spend less time getting dressed of a morning and, looking to reduce this time still further, have contemplated velcro-straps for the trainers rather than laces. Still am contemplating them, thirteen years later.

I feared velcro would, in a phrase my mother favoured, lose its nature. Interrogating those who had gone down the velcro route produced no useful information. Nearly all regarded trainers as fashion accessories and discarded them long before the straps had ceased to strap. I only discard mine when light shows through the heel.

The fancy suede-ish shoe shown is my wife’s and was bought in January. Given she has size 3½ feet it probably cost a bomb. The straps are still giving good service but there is no guarantee that aesthetic disenchantment with the shoe will not precede velcro failure. So, no guidelines there. In any case my footware gets a far harder work-out than my wife’s.

I usually expect my continuously-used trainers to disintegrate within fifteen months of purchase. For some deeply buried reason I would feel betrayed if I was forced to junk them because the hairy bits no longer hooked up. For me a junkable trainer is one that lets in water. Does anyone out there have any scientifically-backed views on velcro longevity?

Well, am I deluding myself?

My two most necessary screwdrivers are both about 35 cm long. Length is important for delivering maximum torque and 35 cm is about the optimum: beyond that it’s often difficult to maintain contact with the screw head.

Two other features are vital. The handle must be 100 per cent grippable and it’s surprising how many aren’t, usually because they can’t accommodate the whole of your hand. The other is the tip of the shaft, of which more later.

The conventional (yellow handle) screwdriver dates back to 1972. We’d just bought our first British house and were faced with installing hundreds of Rawlplugs. Screwing into Rawlplugs sometimes requires enormous force, especially if the hole in the wall is slightly too narrow. This rather brutal driver sometimes appeared too big for the job but only if you worried about aesthetics. Its dimensions ensured that the tip could be squared off (instead of tapering like a chisel) to give maximum tight contact with the screw slot.

The blue-handle Pozidrive screwdriver cost what was then an eye-watering £10 but once I’d got over that I was well satisfied. Cheap cross-head tips quickly wear and the driver must be thrown away. This one has survived 35 years and still engages sweetly. But its unique quality relates to its thin shaft. I may be deluding myself but the shaft seems to twist very slightly when force is applied, tightening the contact with the screw. As a result it rarely disengages accidentally. An old blogger’s tale?

Gardeners waste vital resource

That new presenter, so smug, so egregiously exhortative, resembling a former Scots Guards corporal reduced to teaching PT at a minor public school. And when Carol Klein comes on I go upstairs to put on my pyjamas. No, I’m not a fan of Gardeners’ World but I allow it to flicker at the far end of my focus, earning me reciprocal viewing rights when MotoGP comes around.

I’ve watched GW for years concentrating on the bits I suspect real gardeners ignore. The presentational techniques, the way the camera loved Monty Don, Titchmarsh and Geoff Hamilton and how the simplest of jobs (eg, taking a cutting) was often invested with particle physics mystique. Then there’s the linguistics.

It started with the verb to pot. Quite quickly I learned gardeners potted on, potted out and even potted up. I was never able to discover whether these variants were different or simply an oral tic on the part of the instructor, wheezing as he bent over the terracotta. Digging up and digging in are perhaps predictable but last Friday the PT teacher employed rotted out.

This cavalier attitude has spread like oxalis. New plants are watered in. Lawns mowed over. I tried some inventions of my own based on less promising prepositions. Fertilise between? Didn’t sound plausible. But there are other corruptions. Trees fruit, for instance. Mulch can be turned into a verb and attached to a preposition: mulch down.

The computer industry is rightly censured for murdering English. But try out those ruddy-faced, salt-of-the-earth sons of toil, the aphids of communications. Far from innocent.

A manufacturer for our times

“So what kind of magazine is it? The shitty kind?” Ivor Tiefenbrun opening the batting when I interviewed him in 1987 about his Glasgow hi-fi systems company, Linn Products. No complaints, it was a dream interview.

Linn is renowned for quality and prices. An LP turntable (they still do them) costs £2000, plus £250 for the power supply. But I was there to find out how products were made. Tiefenbrun’s methods were ambitious and techno-sharp-edge. “Automation as the first step to more automation,” Tiefenbrun said. Getting hold of the stuff wasn’t giving him any joy.

Tilting back, feet on the desk, in jeans and an open-necked shirt (both rare among businessmen then) and wreathed in Gauloise smoke, he railed against suppliers’ poor service and lack of realism. “One quote for the automated handling system was bigger than the budget for the whole new factory. Another company was well down on price but they gazumped us.”

And: “Planning delays eroded our budgets and cost us a fortune. All the state bodies have buggered us about. Some 10% of the building cost is related to fire protection; it’s just a joke.”

A lot of it was too technical – but funny and profane – for general consumption. If he hadn’t been someone with a worldwide reputation he might have been seen as a blowhard. But he often knew more about technology than those supplying it. Later I actually paid to hear him speak about manufacturing at a prestige event organised by the Royal Society of Arts. One memorable sentence: “Those that didn’t know about willies would think it was a good thing to have.”

José, can you see....!

Didn’t post yesterday for reasons that become apparent if you click on:

http://bestofnow.blogspot.com/2008/11/portrait-election-celebration.html

So, late in the day, what can technology contribute to the emotions running through the blogs I’m most familiar with? We could imagine a Linn hi-fi chain (Expensive but the best) playing a familiar piece of Beethoven and blasting out those childish but heart-breaking words Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt although I always thought it was fur rather than der.

Fireworks? They’d be good, except I’m ignorant about their creation. I do know the constituents of gunpowder (charcoal, sulphur, saltpetre) but not the amounts. Now there’s a future post: an attack on those oh-so-blasé culinary experts with their esoteric “handfuls”, “pinches” and “soupcons.

Booze (by which I mean anything alcoholic). The obvious grape for toasting Obama is, of course, pinot noir. Its peculiarities previously limited it to the vineyards of Burgundy but now everyone’s at it. California (If you haven’t seen Sideways try, try and rectify that emission), Chile and – especially – New Zealand have all done marvellously and, alas, proved that no one can do burgundy like Burgundy can.

Physiology. When I first managed half a mile of continuous crawl several years ago I left the pool feeling as if my arteries were pumping Alka-Seltzer. “It’s the endorphins,” explained my wife. Dunno what they are but endorphins and Obama go together.

Most watch but who remembers?

Each day my eyes observe two minutes of minor theatricals which, once over, are instantly forgotten. Given my druthers (splendid Pittsburgh idiom) I’d resume my book but my wife insists. Then she too forgets what has been disclosed. I am talking about the weather forecast which follows the late TV news.

It should interest me. It’s based on technology, measurements and science. I assume those frequently mentioned isobars are notional lines linking points of equal barometric pressure and they allow somebody, not me, to analyse what’s going on in The Great Invisible. When isobars are close together it’s going to blow. But why? And do I care?

The French TV weather forecasts are similarly choreographed but the announcers do it at 400 words a minute. With one other difference: they tell you what saint’s day it is.

Britain, whatever the moaners say, is a temperate country and as Robert Robinson of Stop the week fame said: tomorrow’s weather will be like today’s but slightly different. When I first got to the USA in early January I heard a forecast with two salient points: there’d been 103 in. of snow in Oswego, NY, and the temperature in International Falls, Minnesota, was minus 47 deg. Now that’s weather!

However there are circumstances when my meteorological atheism becomes faith-based and that’s at sea. The super-condensed information (with its evocative regions) takes on a liturgical tone with implications of life and death. For light relief I’ve been known to listen to it a second time, in French, just to hear peu perturbé repeated over and over.

Maltreating Mozart is a capital offence

Richard Dawkins (Professor Satan as creationists would have him) has retired from the Chair of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford and will be succeeded by Marcus du Sautoy. Mathematician follows biologist.

As if making his CV public de Sautoy has just completed a four-part series The History of Maths on BBC4 which left me with mixed feelings. Television has popularised “dumbing down” but here was a rare example of “clevering up”. And I’m not talking about such brain-crackers as the Riemann Hypothesis.

Earlier du Sautoy paid tribute to work done in the Arab world, China and India (plus Greece of course) on the basics of geometry and algebra. The trouble is he was just too damned quick. There was something about base number systems which he illustrated with pebbles and you’d have thought he was doing the three-card confidence trick. With fifteen seconds on the subject I might have grasped it; given only ten I was lost.

Will du Sautoy be less controversial than his predecessor? I’m not too sure. Parts of the maths series were backed by classical music which isn’t a crime in itself. But it’s one thing to accompany Newton’s fluxions with Bach counterpoint (there’s plenty of it to go around) but it’s quite another to use the initial duet from Figaro as musical wallpaper. Yes I know Figaro was measuring up (Geddit?) his bed but with music like that you’re inclined to attend to the background not the foreground. Next time, Marcus, use some forgettable rock.

Living in the future's an advantage

Does this theory grab you?

Imagine the day computers were introduced to the public and what a struggle it was learning how to use them. Fast forward a year or two. A different set of people are using computers for the first time yet with far less of a struggle. Another fast forward. Now even liberal arts people are finding computers aren’t as difficult as they feared.

Forget technological improvements. This apparent transfer of experience is part of a theory called morphic resonance which received an airing in no less a publication than New Scientist nearly thirty years ago. Its origins lay in the growth of crystals (ie, a new crystal shape took years to appear; thereafter this same shape re-appeared faster and faster). The theory was then widened to include human behaviour.

Sounds a bit New Age, doesn’t it? But it was posited by a scientist called Sheldrake with impeccable academic credentials and although interest has now died down it’s the sort of idea that nestles in your cranium for years after. Especially when watching your grandson coming to terms with a £10 electronic keyboard.

Since it was a genuine double octave job with black and white keys was Zach’s growing familiarity with its potential in line with old Muss es sein? Es muss sein! LvB all those years ago? Nah. I’m clearly not watching enough reality TV.

Romantically sweaty

The cod history, 1066 and all that, first published in 1930 is still in print. It is famous for its definitions. “History,” the authors say, “is all you can remember.” History is also divided into “good things and bad things”.

And that there were two sides in our civil war: “Roundheads (‘right but revolting’) and Cavaliers (‘wrong but romantic’)”. Even as an impressionable young Tyke I was proud to belong to the former. And I’m pleased now to salute the authors’ prescience. Modern Cavaliers no longer cleave to the monarchy but persist with romantically wrong opinions.

A friend suffered from the heat while driving in France. I pointed out that the car had air conditioning. “Oh, I have to have the windows open. I can’t do with breathing that artificial air.”

Once (I don’t make a habit of it) I drove, stresslessly, from the Channel ferry port of Caen to Castelnaudary, 45 miles from the Mediterranean. Some 600 miles made possible by switching on the A/C and closing the windows. No sweat and no exhausting wind roar, just 80 miles hour after hour. Mind you, my car was a Lexus, preferred transport of the US criminal classes.

Artificial air? Well, my air had been shriven of pollen (I’m a hay feverist) and of unnecessary moisture. And like most A/C systems mine offered two options: treatment of self-contained air or of incoming air. Being revolting I chose the latter. Besides, I believe the Cavaliers over-dressed.

Simple's best. And it's nice to hold

Looking for modernity in simple hand tools is usually a chimera. It’s not coincidental that 100-year-old shapes have lasted. I once bought a claw hammer moulded from a single piece of silvery metal. Just two faults: the face of the hammer head was too small, and because the claw wasn’t up to the task of extracting nails one of the tines(?) broke off. Pincers are better for small/medium nails, a crowbar for the bigger ones.

This I believe is a ball peen hammer but how many of us ever use the ball peen bit? As far as I know its primary function is for hammering out dints in sheet metal, a job which is beyond anyone who has not trained as a panel beater. I met a professional panel beater in the RAF and in talking about his craft he mentioned another of his tools as a planishing hammer. I found that adjective mysteriously engaging.

My first landlord in the USA was a great DIY man and he gave me a short-handled ball peen hammer which accompanied me back to the UK and which I used for many years. In an incredible double coincidence I met my ex-landlord on a press trip to Venezuela and discovered he was a journalist. He remembered the hammer.

I’ve never entirely mastered the technique of ensuring 100 per cent security when attaching the hammer head to a new shaft but this one has stayed on for some time now. Perhaps because my hammering days are mainly in the past. I love the subtly shaped shaft and the smoothness of the wood.

With the Remington, it's personal

I mentioned how changing from typewriter to word processor (May 20) benefited most people who write for a living. But I was dismissive about the earlier technology and the benefits it too conferred.

In 1952 I began journalism proper at the Bingley office of Bradford’s The Telegraph & Argus. Owning this 17 lb portable I avoided sharing the office’s ramshackle Underwood with two other reporters and/or writing my stuff with a fountain-pen as my boss did. On National Service I typed letters home during a year’s RAF training in the UK but left it behind when stationed in Singapore.

The Remington accompanied me to work in the USA. On my return it suffered a grievous blow when the New York Hilton insisted on piling it high on a trolley whence it fell. It was repaired and, home-based (as in America), pounded out three-and-half unsuccessful novels plus rewrites.

Other than the above repair it wore out one roller and nothing more. The evidence that millions of words have clattered through its works appears on the northern periphery of the E-key, eroded by an unremitting assault from the nail of my left index finger. I have used it to apply for jobs, to write to my fiancée who became my wife (sparing her the ambiguities of my handwriting), to maintain exchange correspondence lasting several years and to complain about service from various national bodies. It is as intimate with me and my life as any mechanical device could be. I have said I’d give it to a worthy cause but I’d rather not.

When I mentioned I was doing this blog my wife said why not put the Remington on a side table in our dining room. A noble suggestion which I will accept.

It's good to live in a golden era

Last night the landing light popped, cutting off all the other upstairs lights on that circuit. OK, it was a pain going down into the garage and pushing past my cold, cold car in my jim-jams to flip the switch, but not too big a pain. Because I can remember what the job entailed in Neanderthal times.

In those days fuses really blew. And since there were fewer of them much of the house would be in darkness. First you had to find the torch and the fuse wire. Then (holding the torch in your mouth) pull out the ceramic holder, slacken off two screws, attach a new length of wire and re-insert the holder.

As a result I am in love with my consumer unit (stupid phrase; fuse box was better). First, it’s so damn sensitive, able to throw the switch when a mere bulb filament parts. Second, rectification couldn’t be easier.

If my consumer unit were a poem it would be written by Ogden Nash:

Candy
Is dandy,
But liquor
Is quicker.

If it were prose it would be an extract from Thurber’s Agony Aunt column for animal problems:

Question: We have cats like most people have mice.
Answer: So I see from the photo but I can’t tell whether you need help or are just boasting.

Why sailors prefer "instant"

Takista moored at a marina east of Bilbao whose name escapes me (all those Basque Xs and Zs). Brothers Bonden Minor and Bonden Minimus, Takista’s owner, are fiddling with a recalcitrant jib.

COOKING AT SEA The phrase is euphemistic. When you’re really at sea – and especially in the Bay of Biscay – culinary aspirations don’t really extend beyond applying heat.

After we left this forgotten marina for Hendaye I helmed for the first time. As a treat Minimus went below and did mugs of instant coffee all round. Later, after my iron-set knuckles had been pried from the wheel with a crowbar, I decided to return the favour. I knew that the hob was on gimbals and that there were clamps for the kettle. What could go wrong?

Yachts at sea move. They move to extremes. Worst of all they move unpredictably. Never mind the clamped kettle. What about the unsecured mugs made, thank God, out of Melamine? The answer seemed to be to wedge them into the sink for the terrifying moment when the kettle made its journey across the galley. A journey which revealed that the cook (me) too was unsecured. My eventual position, with feet at least 2 m apart, recalled a technique called “chimneying” occasionally employed when I was still flexible enough to be rock-climber.

On a later leg of our holiday, a long overnight hop from Cap Breton to Arcachon, I’d graduated to tinned stew and making toast. A giant step.

Clumsy language, vital accents

The headline to the October 18 post is a Shakespearean quote which I wanted to break at the point where the poetic line ends. Pressing Enter didn’t work so I reverted to HTML, opening and closing with “div”.

As a professional user of Quark Xpress I found HTML shockingly clumsy when I created a community website. The difference between engraving and shaping sandstone with a broom handle. Blogger’s HTML is of course much simpler than nightmarish Dreamweaver (the preferred sofware for websites) but removes many options and – to some extent – discourages people from learning the code for HTML tags. Such as “div”.

Despite this responders to blogs are invited to write in such tags. Many don’t bother. Alas, I am the victim of my intellectual pretensions. I use French phrases quite a lot and believe they deserve itals (ie, the “em” tag, although I believe there is an alternative). Since I prefer to write in Word then cut and paste, I find it good practise to put in the code at this stage.

French also demands accents. Missing one out causes me pain and my readers confusion. Without the final acute the past participle of donner looks like the carelessly transcribed name of a famous poet. Thus the icon for Windows’ character map is permanently installed top right on my desktop. I guess this makes me kinda anal.

"I drink the air before me and return,Or 'ere your heart twice beat."

My neighbour, two doors down, is a very, very enthusiastic gardener. Not content with his own plot, he mows the grass outside his house even though it’s “council land”. (Guess who’s the odd man out along our street when it comes to mowing the council’s grass.)

Some days ago Herefordshire Council told him to desist. He was “guilty of encroachment”. Turning the grass into a bowling green might discourage pedestrians from walking on it. The story leaked first to the local press, attracted regional attention on telly and then got huge national coverage in The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph.

But this is a techno story. Not a great fan of either of those two publications I was unaware of their lucubrations. But an ex-neighbour now living in Canada reads the DT online and emailed me the news. A four-thousand mile journey to tell me about something occurring 25 m away. The world is in your backyard.

DIY NOT GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH My garage door is an up-and-over and had been getting stiffer. A few squirts of WD40 on the bearings and it rose up under finger pressure. But what goes up… My mind, attuned to the previous stiffness, was not in gear as I stepped into the garage and the free-as-air door crashed down on my head. I survived to blog but am wondering whether I should have delivered an extra squirt up my ear’ole.

Pull this and we start moving

(Left) My brother’s yacht Takista at Royan. (Right) His son-in-law’s Dipper (police launch to the rear) moored at Holyhead

With cars much of the technology is disguised and/or simplified before it comes to the driver’s attention. With a yacht technology is overt.

Take a yacht’s head, for example. Takista’s was fiendish. One lever opened and closed access to the hellhole below; the other provided water so that a third lever could be waggled to provide a flushing action. I think I’ve got this right. After a while I didn’t have the courage to ask further and tended to arrange my bodily functions around visits to the marina.

We mustn’t talk about engines. My brother was highly superstitious about them. Not only were jokes not allowed, he even discouraged casual conversation on the subject. In any case the whole point of a yacht is to derive forward progress from the sails. The foresail is sort of semi-automated and is stowed away by allowing it to roll up round the forestay. The mainsail on Takista was hoisted by hauling on a rope to the side of the mast. On Dipper this task could be achieved by ropes taken to cleats for’ard of the cockpit – less dangerous if the sea was skittish. My brother seemed to regard this as effete.

The yacht’s equivalent of a handbrake is the anchor. Occupying the forward berth on Takista my sleeping head rested uneasily on the anchor chain. The radio was not tuned to BBC3 for Mahler but to channel 16 the universal open frequency on which information about disasters initially unfolds. Depth measurement systems have no parallel on a car.

I came too late to yachts and my enthusiasm has the zealotry of a recent convert. Inevitably I will return to this fascination.

Towards the better burger

What constitutes a good frying pan? Given the obloquy the subject generates perhaps a different name would be a start. The Americans say skillet but I’ve never been sure the terms are synonymous. I’m astonished to find the French have a word for fry (frire); you’d hardly know it from restaurant menus where poelé is the preferred participle. A German frying pan is a Bratpfanne if you can manage those awkward internal consonants.

My director of culinary research tells me this is a good one. It cost nearly £45 and was bought at Hereford’s genuine hardware store, Philip Morris, where the choice is enormous. The pan was made in France and the brand is Anolon.

Contrary to expectations the metal handle does not get hot during frying. In fact it has an extra benefit – when finishing off a Spanish omelette you can stick the whole thing under the grill. However, the handle does get hot then. Note the massive rivets that attach the handle; no need to fiddle with the fat-covered cross-head screw holding on a plastic handle.

With cheap frying pans the bottom eventually bulges upwards resulting in unequal heat distribution. This one’s bottom must be nearly 3 mm thick so bulging is unlikely. The sides are nicely angled ensuring a smooth slide transfer.

Finally, it must be recognised that frying pans – especially non-stick ones like this – are eventually expendable and must be replaced. My DCR recognises this and is prepared to bite on the bullet when the time comes.