Theoretically wonderful, actually banal

Here is my new rinky-dink mobile, bought last Saturday under close instruction from the experts – my daughter and granddaughter. Not a big deal in most people’s lives, but seismic in mine.

Its predecessor was eight years old and would still be in use if it hadn’t tumbled to the floor in Diafani. Twenty minutes after being switched on it flags up “Insert SIM card”, even though the SIM card remains in place.

As far I am concerned, advances in mobile phone technology could well have featured in the Rubaiyat:

Like snow upon the desert’s empty face,
Lighting its little while is gone.

I make twenty calls a year, half to logis in France. In a truly busy year I receive one or two. I am of course a pay-as-I-goer and, in one of my life’s little tragedies, I regret keenly that I topped up before Diafani (but failed to use the phone once while there) and the present £43 credit is beyond retrieval.

For me, mobile phones allow me to pass on terse announcements about my whereabouts and my ETA. A vital function yet somehow uninvolving. The seemingly obligatory camera on the replacement is likely to remain unused. Two pluses: the new phone is smaller and lighter and the address book design is greatly improved.

Mobiles should excite me but don’t. The stupendous technology is somehow blurred by users’ fascination with ringtones and overheard semi-dialogues at blare level.

Feels right, writes right

My Logitech wireless mouse, a gift about four years ago at an eye-watering £73, is showing signs of terminalism and I’m presently road-testing a replacement. The Logitech was rechargeable and had its own neat little charging bay; the newer one works on disposable batteries. “It is of course lighter,” said my excellent and local computer man. “If you can’t get on with it we’ll find you something heavier at half the price.”

After a week I hardly notice the difference in weight. Which is surprising since I’m very weight conscious when it comes to ball-points.

Yes I do still use a pen and I’m pretty choosy about the make. It’s got to be a Parker. The one on the left was bought decades ago and I have even bought refills for it. The one on the right was a freebie from an insurance company. Underneath – for the sharp-sighted – is a memo list of techno-blog subjects.

It’s not just the weight that matches the Parker so sweetly to my fingers. Length, thickness and the shape of the pointy end all play a part. Not that the Parker improves my writing. That remains terrible and I was punished repeatedly for it at school. It’s simply that I feel I can write better – in a literary sense – with the Parker. No doubt a delusion brought on by old age.

Fact is, the reverse is true. I feel mentally clumsy using one of those stalk-like give-aways. I wonder if Parker sponsors bloggers.

How I didn't fit the battle of Jericho

Trumpets work well even though this one is well past its sell-by date. The emotional content of the music is often directly related to the pressure on your diaphragm and this can compensate for a quarter-speed performance and increasingly shaky intonation as you climb the scale.

Note there are only three valves which might suggest that it is a good deal easier to play than the piano with its 80-odd keys or the violin which, theoretically, has an infinite number of stops. True in a sense. However, as things get higher the valves become less relevant as more and more notes are created by embouchure (lip tension) alone.

I was always drawn to the trumpet. Since I couldn’t read music I laboriously transcribed the fingering for simple tunes on to paper and then went down to practise in my long-suffering mother’s gloriously resonant cellar. I was even disciplined enough to play a whole octave of scales beginning with what I fondly imagined to be middle C (Open, 1&3, 1&2, 2, open, etc). Alas, when I tried my first (and last) duet with a piano and provided my middle C the pianist bluntly pointed out that it was in fact B flat. One of us had to adjust and it wasn’t going to be him.

I quickly reached the limits of my competence. I never mastered double tonguing (tacka-tacka) never mind triple tonguing. And I always had rhythm problems which manifested themselves elsewhere in my ability to dance a foxtrot to quickstep music. On the whole I was reduced to playing hymns which, given my attitude towards religion, led to a good deal of misunderstanding, especially in the USA.

My lip went years ago and this battered bit of tubing is retained out of pure sentimentality. I am quite prepared to join anyone who feels the need to create a Failed Trumpeters Club.

CODA (Two days later). In dwelling on my inadequacies I see I have failed to convey the sheer pleasure for me, a non-musician, derived from creating - however badly (though I always looked for improvement) - any sort of music. Lady is a tramp with its trickiness still unresolved after the fiftieth attempt was always worth the effort.

Falstaff nudges my elbow

A great bargain: 37 BBC DVDs covering the complete Shakespeare for about £120. I mean, how otherwise will you ever see Timon of Athens? We watched the plays on telly in the seventies and are now re-viewing them. Two surprising enlightenments: The Comedy of Errors and Henry Vl, pts 1 – 3.

Plus a salutary reminder from Falstaff: “Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying.” It’s not that I overtly fibbed but I may have left the wrong impression and I feel I must do a little repolishing.

The subject was motorbikes – what else? The hero was the Honda Fireblade and for starters I must confess to a conflict of interest. In asking Honda if I could use an official photo of this mighty beast I was mildly interrogated about my motives. As a result I was given the key to the Honda Virtual Press Office! This may have affected my disinterestedness.

More important, did I leave anyone believing I had ridden a Fireblade? If so I apologise. I haven’t. I’d like to but things are stacked against me. The insurance companies have identified a new category of risk with its own amusing acronym which, alas, I forget. Basically it concerns men d’un certain age who now have the wherewithal to indulge activities they could only dream of in their youth. They buy a two-wheeled monster and then do fatal damage to themselves, the bike and a tree. It’s usually a tree.

Restrained by the work of actuaries I can only stand by the roadside and yearn. There, am I shriven?

A plumbing cri de coeur

Diafani diary 5. I’ve never made much of a fist of plumbing, possibly because I’ve only dabbled. Faced with repairs or small projects the temptation has been to renounce solder and opt for compression joints called olives, often with disappointing results.

Meditating in our Diafani bathroom I noticed a variant to what I regard – though I may just have been horribly unobservant – as traditional plumbing. Copper piping had been replaced by flexible tubes sheathed in wire mesh and equipped at each end with fittings resembling those used in high-pressure hydraulics and pneumatics.

One advantage is obvious: no need shape the piping. Attaching the fittings is another matter. I assume special equipment is needed – OK if you’re putting in a whole new bathroom, less so when attaching an outdoor tap for the garden hose.

I could Google this. And, if I were prepared to expose myself to public humiliation, I could ask for clarification on a DIY chat service I’ve used for slightly more technical matters. But there is another option.

It’s clear several respondents to Works Well are better qualified than me to run this blog. Also they dispense their wisdom more gently than web-bound DIY maintenance experts. So here I am again, cap in hand. What is the status of this plumbing development?

Mystery solved. A hundred metres out from Venanda beach (qv) there is a clear sandy area of sea bottom about 3 m below the surface. On it, spelt out in stones that must each have weighed 2 kg, is the word ALPNOE. The O has a stone in the middle. Locals were mystified. Googled it is something to do with free diving in Austria. Gotcha!

Atomic clocks not much use here

The ferry arrived at 7.10 pm.

BB leaves Venanda beach apparently towed by his visibility float. Note orange tee-shirt

Diafani diary 4. Diafani’s only public clockface is on the church tower. Two sides were visible from our hotel window, both told different times and both had been stopped for three years to my knowledge. But then who goes to a Greek island to clockwatch?

Yes, but… You leave Diafani by ferry which arrives at 5.35 on a Saturday evening. That’s what the ferry company’s website says and that’s what the printed schedule – which I picked up on the incoming ferry – says. Except that it doesn’t. Diafanians shrug and say “about seven”. Demanding greater certainty, I am recommended by Tony of La Gorgona restaurant, to keep an eye on the southern headland. “When the ferry shows there you’ll know it’s coming.”

Greek time. Nikos’s boat leaves for a trip to the island of Saria at 10 am. “Is that 10 am Greek time Nikos?” I ask. And Nikos roars with laughter but fails to confirm or deny.

Dr Blagojević’s husband, Dr Miodrag Vujošević (Misa for short), is an economist and spatial/environmental planner, and we chat as we pass on the street. In response to my “Greek time” he cites “Greek calendar” which, alas, I am never able to follow up with him. But it makes sense. Change of seasons means more on Diafani than the flow of hours. Many people leave the village during its unrewarding winter for work on Rhodes or in Baltimore, Md.

That's why when I tell someone I’ve knocked a couple of minutes off my best swim time down to Venanda beach they’re much more interested that I did it wearing an orange tee-shirt (“He swims in his clothes”). To protect my shoulders from sunburn, if you must know.

Hellenophilia came too late

Diafani diary 3. Language. Not exactly a technology but a mechanism which links humans and is second in importance only to the act of reproduction. Despite the problems different languages impose most of us would confirm the right of all countries, races and ethnic groups to speak their language of choice. Which is why Esperanto eventually turned out to be deader than Latin.

On the other hand there are the tongues which don’t employ an immediately recognisable alphabet. Take Greek.

For Anglo novices Greek has three tiers. In the first, triangles and toasting forks predominate. In the second these visual obscurities are rendered anglo-phonetically (stolee katadheeres). In the third tier we emerge into the sunlit uplands of what we know (= wetsuit).

The linguistic links with English are often distant, as above. But occasionally they are childishly simple. Speak sandoeets out loud and its meaning becomes clear – sandwich. Tost is even closer. Other words throw out seductive hints. Ask for the bill and the word logariasmos resurrects all sorts of academic memories.

I have arrived at Greek far too late in life. I have a 2% chance of making myself understood in German, a 27% chance in France and a 41% chance in the USA. My English comes and goes. Greek must be regarded as a lost cause and this must be its last reference on this blog. For Greek is dangerous. If there’d been a fire on September 20 at the airport at Rhodes (Rodos, an easy one) on our journey home we really couldn’t have wasted time pondering the significance of ΕΞΟΔΟΣ when its English equivalent, EXIT, sounds close enough to Greek anyway.

Inside is what counts

Diafani diary 2. Other than the sea, the arid surrounding mountains and (by far the most important) the people, Diafani lacks facilities. It is definitely not a resort. Yet visitors return.

One welcome returner was Dr Ljiljana Blagojević, associate professor with Belgrade University’s architecture faculty, who lived in London for eight years. This year I asked her for examples of good modern architecture I might be familiar with.

Her first – and immediate – choice was the Festival Hall. What a pity RFH is so close to the ugly National Theatre, I said. Oh no, the NT is also well-designed.

Then I realised that unlike most architects Dr Blagojević was talking internals rather than externals and evoking Le Corbusier’s “machine for living” or its variant “machine for enjoying leisure activities”. This recalled my Wisteria Paradox - the disparity between time spent looking at and (we hope!) admiring the outside of our houses compared with the time spent using and appreciating their inner features.

A disparity born out of a visit to a friend’s 400-year-old Wiltshire cottage: beautiful to look at outside but a nightmare of electrical compromises from installing wiring systems on and around impenetrable walls a metre thick.

Our present house is ten years old and its appearance is functional (see inset). Yet it is the most comfortable and practical home we have occupied. It could look nicer but I feel sure we’d pay a price for this inside. Not something we’d willingly accept.

Nations united by footwear

Diafani diary 1. Technology at its lowest – and it failed. Carrying fins, mask and snorkel I saw the strap had broken on one of my flip-flops which I need to cross stony beaches. My feet, cossetted by a decade of wearing trainers, are now as soft as a baby’s bottom. No solution in Diafani: the general store sells bottles of Scotch, postcards and detergent.

Outside a bar six healthy young people were loading up two rental cars, suggesting they would shortly be off to some location with wider retail potential. At my wife’s suggestion I offered a proposition. If anyone was prepared to sell me flip-flops I would hand over sufficient cash to pay for the most luxurious replacement pair.

This generated much good humour. Broken straps on flip-flop are universal. One young women was wearing an odd pair, one – in pink, decorated with a plastic flower. Not my style but, as my grannie used to say, needs must when the devil drives. I was asked if I was in the habit of clothing myself this way. I said I depended heavily on the kindness of strangers and the allusion was picked up.

Finally Ronel Spies, key account manager with Mix Telematics Mobile Information Exchange of Stellenbosch, SA, (I have her card) kicked off her flips and handed them over. My cash was refused. The only payment was that I photograph the footwear in situ and post the result. Which I do (the new acquisition is on the left) grateful for her generosity and for ten minutes of lively, laughing conversation.

Note 1: The face apparently covered in cotton wool is mine. There is no way this post would be enhanced by the reality the bogus mask conceals.

Note 2. The monk seal (see August 31) did not materialise.