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.