Work designed for idle hands

New technology encourages new vices. When someone keeps me dangling, incommunicate, at the end of a phone-line I use my (newish) technology to play Windows Solitaire. To the point where I often find myself reluctant to respond when a human voice is finally made available.

Solitaire, which we Brits call Patience, adapted for the computer screen has one enormous attraction. Finish a game and the computer re-deals the cards. No shuffling, no problems with jammy fingers. But therein lies the puzzle.

Dealing is the result of random selection. Yet the computer is a machine ("A system that moves/In predestinate grooves/In fact not a bus but a tram.") How does it do randomness?

Anyone able to answer this one is entitled to kick off their comment with a sequence of five stars.

BB tries to defend his shortcomings

Lucy’s comprehensive comment on garlic crushers raised a point about received wisdom. It’s often assumed (Plutarch excepted) women do the cooking and men the DIY. But surely this is a false distinction.

Those who regularly engage in either evolve techniques which improve efficiency, adapt to varying end-products and produce better results. An escalope de veau à la Zagreb (one of my very rare culinary successes) may differ from a well-installed bookshelf but the self-teaching process they both require doesn’t.

There’s a jot of self-interest in this. I feel inadequate in the company of those who are able to use kitchen grammar fluently. So while Lucy and Plutarch were discovering new uses for their Sabatiers I offer in my own defense the decades spent getting the best out of Rawlplugs during which I probably rose to the equivalent of a sous-chef.

All of which became out-of-date when we moved from a 1930s semi (walls predominantly of brick and breeze block) to a modern detached villa where plaster boards complicate attaching things to the walls. My brother (a DIY perfectionist and a cook) recommends locating the wooden mounting frames and screwing into them. But I’ve lacked the requisite confidence. What I do know is: (a) forget the butterfly screws which start sagging under their own weight, (b) in some instances the coarse self-tapper combined with the finer concentric screw (see photo) can work.