All part of the healing process

General anaesthetic? They stick a plumber’s friend over your mouth and pump in isoflurane. But not quite. Don’t forget the muscle relaxant.

The prep didn’t work and I lay awake and febrile on a trolley close to where they keep the sharp things. Desperate, I read The Daily Telegraph proving that the balance of my mind was disturbed. A scruffy quasi-medical figure declared himself baffled by my alertness.

I awoke from the procedure to hear the surgeon complaining it had all taken far too long. But I was concentrating on breathing. It’s a simple activity, I’d been doing it all my life. Except now it wasn’t so simple. My chest muscles were inoperative and my lungs seemed to be elsewhere, perhaps in a waste bin. I was the star in a film about dying from shortness of breath. And I knew what a 35 lb carp feels after being whipped from the river and held for minutes by a grinning angler posing for the camera.

Later the surgeon visited me in the ward. Was I OK? Yes, but the non-breathing had been scary. Ah but that’s all over. Alas, no. I now chose to pass on the bad news that I’d been commissioned by World Medicine to write an article about my experiences. Hmmm.

Ten minutes later I was visited by the scruffy quasi-medical figure who smelt overpoweringly of cigarettes. The anaesthetist. Just the after-effects of the muscle relaxant, he said. But I wouldn’t be writing about that, would I? I reassured him I wouldn’t. But I lied.

A brief attack of the oldies

This one’s going to be tricky. I distrust Golden Eras (“Those Edwardian summers when the afternoons were long and sunny and the gels so pretty…”) but here I am, harking back.

Several blogs and/or comments I’ve read recently speak fondly about digital cameras. Blogging wouldn’t be the same without them. No delay waiting for prints. Lots of technology easily accessed. Zero overheads. Good quality for low outlay. All good stuff.

My 6 megapixel Traveller DC-6900 cost £69 at Aldi and its only fault (rechargeable batteries last about 20 shots) may not be attributable to the camera. Yet who could love this Christmas cracker toy? This deformed Easter Egg?

While still gainfully employed I used a Fuji battery-powered non-digital camera and clearly advancing the film threatened the battery’s capacity. The unease became reality at a T. J. Maxx warehouse in remotest Canada when I ceased to be a photo-journalist and was reduced to my notebook alone. The Pentax replaced the Fuji and my thumb now advanced the film. Speed had to be balanced with aperture. For two years after I retired I did freelance work which meant using a tripod and long long exposures in stygian industrial buildings. I could never have trusted the Traveller.

The Pentax doesn’t do “instant”. It’s heavy too. But it’s beautifully made, the lens is gin-clear and, I’m afraid, I love it. It deserves an ode, if not an eclogue. On verra.

Meet my better half

My 195th post and I’m experiencing a sense of self-persecution. If I renounceed my blogonym a perfect replacement would be: The Man in the Iron Mask - Outside, Tungsten Carbide; Inside, Liberal Arts Jelly-Baby.

Despite this blog’s aims, I have read fiction, some hardish (eg, The man without qualities), listened to music (including Alban Berg’s violin concerto), watched subtitled films and looked at paintings. All potential epiphanies but rejected as grist for this mill. For one thing culture blogging is competitive, for another most people regard the arts as a likely source of “perceptions of the essential nature or meaning of something” and I doubt I could add anything new.

Hence technology and its siblings. And here’s a techno-epiphany. At age 12, in the Monster Puzzle Book, I came upon this: a will is divided so that Jack gets half as much as Jill while Humpty’s portion is equal to… etc, etc. With an insight that has not visited me since, I recognised it as an expression in prose of a pair of simultaneous equations. Gazoing! Although to appreciate that Damascene moment you need to know what a wretched scholar I was. Two French adjectives say it best: débile (feeble) yet têtu (obstinate).

Anyway I decided on a blog which touches on such moments, on the delights of well-cut gears, the neatness of some software and the excitement which motorbikes generate. With each post an additional part of that iron mask was created and the visor descended some months ago. I am now a figure held together by cables, pistons and printed circuits despite pathetic attempts (like this) to re-establish my membership of the intelligentsia. Ahead, the dump.

Local control improves heating system

Somewhat late in the day we decided to have thermostats fitted to the central heating radiators. As thermally inefficient pensioners we’ve had the heating on all day this winter for the first time and solar gain in the living room had indicated the need for local control.

Once the system was drained the ‘stats were quickly fitted. We were not only quoted a very competitive price but on a tour of the house the plumber recommended we only needed to control nine of the twelve radiators. Avoid adding thermostats in places where the temperature varies widely (the bathroom, the kitchen) to prevent excessive valve action.

But my concern was the usage stratagem. Received wisdom says bedrooms could be cooler but the hell with that. One pleasure here has been to wake up into a warm room and walk, stripped to the waist, fitted carpets all the way, into the en suite bathroom, there to remove unneeded facial hair. Shaving benefits from amelioration. In any case it turns out thermostat practice is based on “suck it and see”.

Given a captive plumber I was able to ask the $64,000-dollar question: why are his peers so addicted to Stilson wrenches, those clumsy self-tightening adjustables that risk graunching the corners off nuts? Of course nuts concentric with piping deny them ring spanners but the main reason, reluctantly admitted, is tradition. I would welcome comment on this from Works Well’s US commentators.

EBOOK FREEBIES. All Mark Twain’s letters in six volumes. The University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page (30,000 titles).

Biting the hand that fed them - grits

When senior executives from Detroit’s Big Three recently took their begging bowls to Washington they were vilified for using company planes. Once, much humbler individuals used this form of transport.

The short-haul airliner (Alas, Relucent Reader, I’ve forgotten the type) was emblazoned with North American Rockwell’s logo and colours. Half the seats had been removed to increase leg room for the press party. In the aisle a polished wood box, somewhat larger than a Hammond organ, proved to be a well stocked bar opened while we were still climbing quite steeply. We were bound for Statesboro, Georgia, where I ate grits with red-eye gravy for the first time.

Ostensibly we were visiting a factory manufacturing control valves. In reality we were observing the latest skirmishes in the American Civil War. The factory managers all appeared to be New Yorkers who bitterly resented Statesboro. On the bus from the airport one of them commented: “You’ll see the town has a railway running through it. This is so lots of people can live on the wrong side of the tracks.”

Later were were told how to obtain a driving licence – necessary if you move to another state. “You pull up at a drive-in window in the town hall. You hand over your application form and five dollars. You’re told to drive round the town hall and pull up again to pick up your licence. Which would have been just fine except that my neighbour was driving the car.” Lots of sipping whisky that evening brought more of these stories which – inevitably – I have forgotten. Together with anything I learned about control valves.

Ebook reader: progress report

It’s beginning to look more like a book. The MS of Gypsy Scholar, which Jinks and I have sweated over for two years, now resides on my swanky new Sony Portable Reader System alongside War and Peace, The Heart of Darkness and 98 other titles which came as freebies.

As explained, the aim is to read the MS as if I were a reader instead of an editor. I did the transfer yesterday and was ready to go but swimming pool water got into my goggles and left my eyes streaming. Some time this weekend, then.

How good is the machine? For me, optically as good as paper but it supplements rather than replaces books. Electronic things break and if you were in Timbuktu (excellent BBC4 programme last night about the ancient documents found there) you’d need print back-up. But ponder this. Suppose you were going foreign and needed your big 2½ kg dictionary. If it came as an ebook you could load it into the 255 gm Sony and still have room for Hamlet, The Rights of Man, Middlemarch, On the Origin of Species, Jungle Book, the complete Jane Austen, most of Dickens and le tout Ruth Rendell. In all 160 titles.

At the moment I’m spouting the press release; I need to use the thing. I checked title availability by Googling “ebooks” and turned up half a dozen, mainly university, sources. Project Gutenberg offers 27,000 free out-of-copyright titles. Copyrighted titles you pay for. If you want French books try Athena. On verra.

Latest: Just copied and transferred Rousseau's La nouvelle Héloise (via the Athena site) with no problems. Wonder what it's about.

A reward in this life and thereafter

It’s been done before but what the heck. What have these in common: Grazia Deledda, Werner von Heidenstam, Jacinto Benavente? Let’s make it easier. How about: Elfriede Jelinek, Wole Soyinka, Winston Churchill? That’s right. All six won the Nobel Prize for literature and the latter trio won it post-war.

I used to take flak from a physicist who cited the Nob/lits when jeering at the evanescence of literary taste. Whereas, he said, the Nob/physics not only include the names that should be there but also the deserving lesser lights. I sympathise with hard science practitioners who look on bemused as yet another fictional “genius” is popularly lauded then forgotten in months. Where are you now Wislawa Symborska, who took the cheque in 1996?

But let’s not cry too hard for the unsung quantum mechanics. Their tight world hands out prizes which come close to conferring immortality. Do these words mean anything: henry, becquerel, pascal? They are the internationally approved units for measuring inductance, the activity of a radionuclide and pressure/stress. They are also the surnames of three scientific giants.

Oh, it would be nice to get the cheque but just imagine if the scientific community decided that the quality (Chutzpah? Mendacity? Subversiveness?) of blogs would, from now on, be measured in bondens. Ahhh.

PERFECT NAME FOR A TWO-WHEELER (See below). It isn't a bike and it's not British. But nobody has bettered Vespa (means wasp in Italian).

Names that bypassed the experience

Only Avus and, perhaps, Plutarch will find any pork scratchings here. Everyone else can take the afternoon off.

The bike is a Matchless twin, circ. 1960. By then Matchless and AJS bikes were “badge engineered” (ie, identical hardware, different labels, the aim being to preserve two marques dating back several decades). It’s shown here because, to my surprise, a Matchless appears on the cover of the current Radio Times.

I had intended to expatiate on the quaint optimism embodied in this and other bike names of the period. After only a brief reflection I realised that even quaint optimism was a marketing rarity: Velocette, Triumph and possibly Ariel had the right idea but Sunbeam, Royal Enfield and BSA (standing for Birmingham Small Arms!) completely missed the point. Even worse were the excruciatingly dull names relating to human progenitors: Francis Barnett, James and (unforgivable, given its hairy-chested prowess) Vincent-HRD.

Virtually all British bike names, with the exception of Triumph and Norton (both small operations now), have disappeared and choice is limited predominantly to Japanese companies. Ironically the big four (Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki and Suzuki) all bear the names of their founders yet, because of their foreign-ness, don’t sound quite so tedious. In fact Yamaha, a company that started out making reed organs, and Kawasaki have almost onomatopeiac links with their bike products.

Ducati – the successful Italian manufacturer? Founded by the Ducati brothers.

Time to stop being sentimental?

Here’s an odd literary problem.

For two years I’ve edited a biography. The author and I are now satisfied the manuscript is factually and stylistically acceptable. There remains one final task: to read the MS as if for the first time. To assess it as a reader would.

The author has done this but I’ve held back, doubting my objectivity. Every sentence is so damn familiar. I decided I needed to avoid the computer screen. I could print the MS and read the paper - a horrible waste of consumables. Or I could download to an ebook reader. This technology has greatly improved: the text looks like print on paper not dancing electric dots, you “turn” the pages, a battery charge provides 7000 page turns and the system operates in strong sunlight. A Sony reader costs £220 but I can see subsequent uses.

I asked a super-techno friend who said: “Personally I wouldn't touch a dedicated ebook reader, though it's a case of I haven't tried it because I don't like it. If you want to read (the MS) afresh, print it out, preferably double-sided, cut it to book size and put it in an A5 size folder.” A quick trawl of my PC doesn’t immediately reveal how you print double-sided. A manual solution would be extremely tedious.

I’m on shaky ground. Most, if not all, of this blog’s respondents are passionately and emotionally attached to books. As I am. But once I was attached to my typewriter and here I am initiating streams of electrons. The last holiday on facility-less Karpathos meant that the weightiest part of our luggage consisted of books. An ebook reader can contain 160. Hmmm.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

Paying autoroute tolls in France is a pain. Not because of the amounts, for these roads deliver good value; rather the interface ergonomics. The guichet is on the wrong side of the car (Hey, I know I’m foreign but I’m keeping France’s economy afloat), the ticket carries no way of predicting what’s to be paid, and I’m always a’feared younger daughter will drop the change.

There’s a much better system for the Severn Bridge and no doubt elsewhere in Britain. You’re told well in advance what you have to pay and when you arrive you toss the sum into a plastic hopper. It works well! And there’s this extra anthropomorphic pleasure, imagining this huge conceptual (Can’t stop using that adjective.) mouth swallowing and then digesting the coins.

An enlightened Highways Agency should decorate the hopper with painted teeth and a moustache

THE CURSE STRIKES 09.20 today. Sorting through the contents of the underpants drawer I pull out a white pair carrying a scene from a Loony Tunes cartoon, a joky Christmas table present more than a decade ago. Mrs Bonden: “It’s time those were thrown away.” BB: the usual rejoinder; why discard anything that’s still doing a job?

09. 45, on the way to Tesco for The Observer. That horrible feeling of insecurity as the elastic goes and the pants slide uselessly down my thighs. Underneath my trousers I hasten to add.

Question Can underpants be inveigled into failure?

Til a' the seas gang dry, my love

When L.P. Hartley wrote, “The past is another country. They do things differently there.” he cleverly avoided suggesting whether the things done were better or worse. An admirable aide mémoire for those of us well stricken in years since it hints we should be careful about recalling Golden Eras. Often, the Golden Era is now.

This jazzy device is our kitchen scale and I had intended it to be the basis for a quite different post. But the word scale took me back in time, reminding me of earlier versions of such weighing systems and the effect they had on the general populace.

No one under the age of fifty can possibly imagine how long it took to buy necessities in, say, 1951 . You didn’t serve yourself, you stood in a queue and listened to inordinate chat as white-aproned men behind the counter cut lumps of cheese, poured out bags of sugar and dug into barrels of dried peas then carefully weighed out the amounts. Weighed – that is – by putting the produce in one pan and weights in the other.

Groceries were beautifully tricked out with wooden drawers, hanging reels of string and a beguiling combination of smells. An environment destined straight for the heritage museum. And thank goodness. Using a grocery gave me plenty of time to reflect that the adult capacity for conversation was infinite. Those scales which helped drag out the process now grace the window-bottoms (West Riding phrase) of houses in south-east England. The Golden Age of Weighing? Yes, if you like weighing. Otherwise there’s always our streamlined little number.

Wanna look stupid? No need for a carrot nose

On telly young men in North Face anoraks screech about Britain’s snowfall using rhetoric and sometimes the vocabulary employed in last week’s financial crisis. Contrapuntally, other young men, much more chic, are saying how much better Moscow and Calgary are at coping with their snow. A pointless match null weather story since no local authority south of Inverness is prepared to invest in a fleet of rarely used bulldozers or a Ben Nevis of salt. Or is it grit?

Temperate Dorking, discommoded for all of forty-eight hours, must bite on the bullet and suffer. In Pittsburgh, where I dwelt for a year or two, things were different. The snow was thicker and the Democrat Machine knew what to do about that. What it couldn’t compensate for were the street gradients in the southern suburbs. Steep? Wow!

Locals carried sacks of cement in the already overhanging trunks (ie, boots) of their Chevvy Impalas. Thus when the car’s back end slid sideways in the slush the pendulum effect became uncontrollable. Me? I bought studded rear tyres for my Volvo 122S and smugly sailed up all those forbidding ski-slopes. So smug that I drove out that evening deliberately searching for the most vertiginous thoroughfares.

America knows how to punish smugness. What I hadn’t realised was that those rear wheels would play virtually no role at all when I started descending and needed to brake. The front wheels locked and the Volvo became a Flexible Flyer. Sweatily I guided the car to the roadside and allowed the kerb, graunching against the tyres, to bring things to a halt. At that point I would have been available for a screeching interview about snowy roads.

You can't argue with an orthodontist

Dentists accept being questioned because they can suppress the unanswerable. I asked mine how many Brits-per-year died in the dentist’s chair given that many sit there bathed in fear. She said something diplomatic but forestalled a follow-up question by filling my mouth with her fingers, the scritchy thing, the sucky tube and a pint of saliva.

As she pursued her scratching it occurred to me my teeth were taking a lot of punishment. But they are designed for it. The enamel is rated 5 on the Mohs hardness scale while iron is rated 4 to 5.

Dental surgeries are technology treasure troves. Take the chair; it's complex, so what does it cost? Here’s a funny thing. The Denttek BT ML 4800 DE with its “three powerful motors” has two prices €3594 and €4277. The first for the trade, the second for consumers! Aimed at true enthusiasts who like to rehearse their visits to the dentist.

But the chair seems a bargain compared with “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Dental Burs, Disks, Abrasive Points, Diamond Points, Wheels, and Other Tools for Use with Dental Hand Pieces in Japan.” A paperback, priced to go at £326.70, it reminds us that dental care costs a fortune in Britain. I asked my dentist why she didn’t sell advertising space on the light which looms over the prone patient. This produced a snigger and the brief removal of the sucky tube. Imminent drowning puts an end to investigative journalism.

It's a block; it's a book

Here are some items I appreciate: growing things (galanthus nivalis, say, given the season), paintings (the cliff-top church in Turner’s “Folkestone from the sea” is where we got married), combinations of poetry and music (Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden, Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt…), great prose (“… bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air…”) and slightly obscure wine regions (the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon). Plus this.

This is an engine block. It contains the moving bits like pistons and valves. It is cast from molten metal and many external surfaces carry the rough imprint of the mould because there is no need to polish them. Other surfaces, which have precise dimensional relationships, are machined until this is the case.

Some areas requiring this work are circular holes. Yet circles cannot be precise since they depend on a calculation involving π (the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter) and π is not an exact value. So how come the holes end up the right size? The answer has to do with tolerances, a quality shared with the translation into English of the first sentence of Proust’s A la recherche…

My blog is linked to that of Relucent Reader whose father was a precision machinist. This seemed an admirable activity until RR pointed out his dad found the work stressful. And why not? Working to tiny fractions of an inch (and it would have been inches, then) is more demanding, and carries more responsibility, than the way I earned my living and which I fondly imagined to be an adrenalin job.

The block reminds me of these things.