Once Works Well was pure technology. Now it seeks merely to divert.
Pansy subjects - Verse! Opera! Domestic trivia! - are now commonplace.
The 300-word limit for posts is retained. The ego is enlarged

Friday 3 October 2008

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.