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.

Oh, that feels a whole lot better

Today completely unfamiliar technology turned up on my own doorstep. A ready-made blog.

We’d had an outflow problem on Saturday, fanfared when my wife found two dead rats floating in the entrance to an outside drain. “Foul water or sewage?” asked the man from Drain Clear this morning, cheerily offering me the options. The blockage was quickly resolved. Roots from our neighbour’s front-garden conifer had entered the drainage system and dammed off our access to it.

Once the roots had been chopped away our tubes were given their own special enema with a high-pressure water hose. And I mean high-pressure. How about 2000 psi or, if you prefer it, 138 bar? As a comparison my car tyres are normally inflated to just over 35 psi.

The Drain Clear pump has the capacity to go up to 4000 psi. Used in conjunction with what is called a pencil jet this force would apparently cut through a brick wall. Enough to clear the most recalcitrant embouteillage.

Or inflict more personal damage. Operatives must use these things with care. A bit of carelessness and the jet “would go right through a man’s boot and take his toe off.” I’ll take Drain Clear’s word for it. However I must add that having a drain cleared is – almost literally – cathartic.

It's no fun at all

Just back from the garden after l½-hr work (my absolute limit) trimming the ivy and other ill-defined tasks. I need to work off my resentment, so here’s a list of horticultural ineluctables.

(1) Why is it that how ever many implements you take out of the shed, you always need another? And then another?

(2) Gardener’s World is like watching sado-masochistic porn when you get the heeby-jeebies over a pin-prick. There are people who seem to relish digging. Mind you, the earth they dig is remarkably free from rocks, roots and compressed density.

(3) Trimming ivy doesn’t sound much. What’s a pain is hooking out the cuttings without wrecking the contents of the flower bed.

(4) “But you enjoy the garden when it’s full of colour,” says my wife. Cruelly I point out that she enjoys using her well-honed teeth but finds it difficult to remain philosophical while the dental hygienist goes a’scritching.

(5) A garden creeps up on you like a mugger. Something that didn’t need doing this morning, suddenly requires attention now you’ve got a belly-full of lunch.

(6) Poets rhapsodise about gardens. But can you imagine Dylan Thomas doing topiary? One Plutarch doesn’t foretell a flock of horticultural rhymesters.

OK, I’m purged. Now for a chapter or two of Walter Pater.

The button that brings peace

Since we were as poor as church mice – er, let’s say freethinking mice – in the seventies we didn’t get a colour telly until 1984. With it came a remote control and a whole new world opened up. Or rather, an old world closed down. For the remote had a mute button.

From that day to this we have seen - but not heard - any TV commercials. I am aware of what Hovis did to Dvorak but we remain happily unaware of the aural evidence. Better than that, we are deaf to the exchanges between young men ogling beer and women in pubs, to the music that accompanies the ludicrous publicity about cars and to the blandishments of the man with false teeth selling sofas.

The mute button has even strayed into the news bulletins and we are no longer cognisant of England soccer fans’ views on Hegel and Leibniz. Not all guests to chez Bonden are comfortable with our censorship. One niece’s hand reached for the remote during what she regarded as the unnatural silence. But I am an unyielding host.

Latterly I have become an equally unyielding prophet for another button on the remote. “Do you realise,” I say unpleasantly to many a neighbour who has invested in a TV screen the size of a french window, “real people do not have flat heads suitable for playing ping pong on and that cars are taller than those flat-headed peoples’ waists. Try the aspect ratio control.”

But I remain a prophet without honour outside my own sitting room and my circle of acquaintances is diminishing.

A glance into the abyss

In awe of? Well, I suppose certain natural phenomena (The Bay of Islands, the Matterhorn from Zermatt, the south Brittany coast from the sea) and certain man-made structures (the Millau bridge, Coventry cathedral, the Chrysler building). Technology though tends to impress me rather than touch my soul. Though there was one occasion, and it was all the more memorable for its moral ambiguity.

For professional reasons I went aboard HMS Renown at Gairloch on the Clyde. Renown is – perhaps was – a missile-equipped nuclear submarine which slips off secretly, sometimes for months, into goodness knows what part of the ocean. Not with me aboard, I hasten to add. My job was ask questions about how she was victualled.

Theoretically my brief didn’t extend to Renown’s nature or to her raison d’etre but the hardware was inescapable. The CPO in charge of catering also had a battle job: operating the hydroplanes to initiate a dive or a return to the surface. Later there was the walk forward to the place where those sixteen (I think) ominous cylinders were installed.

Renown was so well-made, damnit. Efficient. Almost a recruiting exercise if you respond to mechanical, electrical and electronic things. She recalled those cutaway drawings in Eagle designed to excite young readers about technology for its own sake. The excitement reached me for it was possible – for a moment – to separate all this hard-nosed beauty from its purpose. I can’t say I wasn’t in awe of it all. Even now, nearly thirty years later, I remember the feeling. And remind myself feelings are not necessarily trustworthy.

Battle between the sexes - on wheels

This is a pretty old motorbike. The photo dates back to 1957 – 58 and even then the bike was seven or eight. The giveaway is the apparent lack of rear suspension. But in fact the rear end was sprung.

For this is a 500 cc Triumph Speed Twin notorious for its spring hub. How did it work? I don’t know. I was more interested in blaring up to the Lake District on it. My guess is the capacious hub accommodated substantial springs arranged radially and that the spindle “floated” at the springs’ notional junction. A horrifying concept which delivered its horror during cornering.

So long as the bike was upright the horror was disguised. But bikes heel over on corners and the springs could not respond logically to this radical change in applied force. My friend Richard, who sold me the bike, put it this way:

“The rear end of the bike flexed during cornering. These oscillations were absorbed in the hub and then re-transmitted – out of phase with the bike’s forward progress – back to the frame. The bike behaved like an animal having a nervous breakdown.”

Should my old Speed Twin be included in a blog called Works Well? Definitely. On one of those Lake District trips the pillion was occupied by a girl-friend who had expressed an interest in rock climbing. Having survived my instruction in Langdale she incautiously referred to my sedate progress on the way back. I’d been holding back on her behalf. A mile or two of open throttle with the Triumph pythonising its way between the dry stone walls returned our conversation to a more even-handed state.

The war we all have to fight

Relucent Reader, lives in Mechanicsville, Virginia, and worries about the threat posed to libraries by the wonky economy. I sympathise. The best public library I’ve used was at Mount Lebanon, a Pittsburgh suburb. Light and airy, well endowed (it was a swanky suburb) and it had a monster letterbox down which you could avalanche your returns at any time. A first for me then.

The assistants were predominantly women, living tributes to the high standards of orthodontics in the USA.

What I can’t recall is the check-in/check-out system which is one way of marking the passage of time in any country. Scroll back several decades and my UK library ticket consisted of a paper pouch. Inside the library book cover was a similar pouch holding a card that identified the book. When I took out a book the card was transferred from the book pouch to my pouch and was stored in a shallow rack.

Processing a returned book the librarian riffled through the stored cards to find the relevant one. This took time. The cards developed a furry look from being riffled. Frequently they weren’t where they should be. More time.

Now the bar code and the computer have speeded things up. But our reading habits are recorded as are the number of fines we've incurred. There’s a price to pay for progress. Also, no one has yet computerised the need to stamp the return date on the book.

Libraries have a special smell, the same on both sides of the Atlantic: dust combined with something sharpish which may be the glue used in book production. I buy more books than I borrow these days but would go to the barricades to protect the library concept.

Biking and a bust string

A gears tutorial. Avus is the progenitor of the blog Little Corner of the Earth which shares a number of interests with Works Well. Apart from a motorbike Avus has at least two pedal bikes which may be indicative of the extremes of his character. The first is a vintage Rudge, in beautiful condition, equipped not only with chain-guard but also with a chain-bath. It is intended for stately, if not majestic, progress and I can imagine it being used for the trip to Buckingham Palace, were Avus to be awarded an OBE.

The other is a drop-handlebar Dawes which he uses for serious outings such as a recent 51-mile tour of some of the loveliest parts of Kent, now photographed, described and posted. Since the Dawes is multi-chainwheel, multi-sprocket (like my bike) I asked him what was the lowest gear he would consider using, consistent with maintaining sufficient forward motion to prevent falling off.

His answer pre-empts a subject I may well have tackled myself. So in the interests of ecumenicism let me provide the link.

Techno-musical moment. At a concert last year in St David’s Hall, Cardiff (programme and orchestra name now forgotten) I noticed something irregular. A string on the leader’s violin had bust. Calmly the leader whispered to the deputy leader who slipped her something out of the pocket of his soup-and-fish. Within less than a minute she’d installed the new string, tuned it and was ready for work. Remarkable enough but it all happened during a period when the string section was inactive. That’s what I call professionalism.

The 21st century pen

It was like a secondary-school reunion, being surrounded by dimly remembered names. Except these were makes of pen. Parker, of course, I knew and Waterman had a classical ring. Shaeffer I associate with the USA but what about Platignum with its curiously intrusive g? Nor did I realise that the brashly pragmatic propelling pencil manufacturer, Yard-O-Led, did pens.

I was looking into the evolution of the fountain pen at the behest of my blog commentators. Surely things had moved on since the days when one lifted a small lever on the side, depressing a rubber bag and creating suction which drank ink. They have. Cartridges are less messy but there’s also a thing called a convertor which is unscrewed to reveal a plunger. With which one plunges.

Inks? Once there was simply blue, black and – for the ultra-fastidious – blue-black. Now you can get brown, green, purple, red and turquoise, the latter for anonymous sex scandal notes. The nanny state is at our elbow. You are warned that changes in cabin air pressure on planes may cause your fountain pen “to leak”, coded manufacturer talk for “explode”.

Roller balls seem to cost more than nibs. A cool £215 if you want to rotate with Shaeffer. Waterman’s Carene de luxe is nibbed and a snip at £146.50.

My research was entirely altruistic since I am not in the market for one of these devices. If I wrote with a fountain pen people might expect me to write better. I’d rather they offered up oblations (The first time I have used that word. Now there’s a thing.) celebrating the invention of the word processor.