Bird thou never wert..... wert?

The Stanley Tools System of Versification is aimed at aspirant poets who’d be better off waxing their cars. Like most ill-conceived tuition it is based on analogy. The completed poem is seen as a wall built from multi-coloured flexible bricks which can be elongated and compressed. The poem’s dynamics are simulated by a wave form which ripples continuously along the wall, creating a rhythmic base and highlighting mismatched bricks.

An early graduate of STSV I embarked months ago on a four-verse poem in iambic pentameter. Since I know little poetry, don’t read it much and know nothing of its making I was, to use a cant phrase, outside my comfort zone. But I felt disadvantaged, surrounded as I was by those who were producing sonnets in industrial quantities, tossing off haikus and terza rima and translating from the Czech.

My proposed poem sprang from juxtaposing a three-syllable adjective with a single-syllable noun. A month later I devised a phrase which summarised particle physics. After a further month I discarded the particle physics phrase. Brick building proved to be a snare. Flemish Bond unites bricks well but makes for monotonous poetry: di-di, di-di, di-di.

The incomplete poem lay rusting on my hard disc, the first two verses apparently unbridgeable. With what now seems like unmitigated gall, I asked Julia if she could help. After deferring to the greater skills of Lucy and Eleanor she agreed but simply publishing this request stirred my somnolent muse and an idea for the link occurred. I presently play with elongatable bricks. “Dodecahedron” takes up half an iambic line and I find that encouraging.

But the coffin they carry you off in

THE COUGH A captain in the Royal Artillery explains:

“A pre-loaded mortar, placed deep in the ventral cavity below the umbilicus, is triggered by a random-number-generating oscillator with an unpredictable output. The charge is deliberately under-prescribed and the projectile leaves the barrel comparatively slowly.

“Initially the diaphragm twitches to the passage of the projectile but as speed increases the twitches become powerful spasms. Sensing these spasms the thoracic muscles contract defensively. The lungs are aware but have no real protection. Impact is at maximum velocity and lung volume reduces to zero at sonic speed.

“Air, also at sonic speed, evacuates the bronchia. Sympathetic laryngeal reaction creates a venturi, raising the speed yet again. Emerging into the spherical mouth cavity the compressed air expands and escapes at a velocity capable of imposing a reed effect on the lips and the tongue. The resultant noise, identified by the subject as “Just clearing my throat” and by concert-hall neighbours as “That bastard should be put down”, has been rated as high as 69 dBA.”

I said I wouldn’t refer to it again but by a journalist’s prerogative I lied. I am told that the performance of War Requiem which starred Ian Bostridge and which I forewent (Is that a word?) was superb.

Paved with bad intentions

Not far from where I live, Morgan cars are built. True sports cars (ie, penile bonnet, spine-jarring springs, impossible to enter with the canvas roof down, ludicrously over-priced), they tend to be owned by post-menopausal men who effect hogging caps. Until fairly recently the driver needed to press a dashboard button every 400 miles, causing oil to flow into the front suspension units.

When I was eighteen I would have loved one. From my forties onward, I held them in disdain. They belong to a tradition which equates discomfort with classicism. An era when breaking down was a form of getting back to nature.

Morgan has unseen links with my first, and worst, car the Austin Cambridge. The days when the customer wasn’t king. The Cambridge had a four-speed gearbox which meant first gear was necessary for some hills. But as everyone knew synchromesh on first failed permanently after a mere 600 miles from new. So engaging first required the driver to double-declutch. Hands up all those – especially Americans – who have even heard of this fearsome procedure.

It was impossible to remove the oil filter without de-activating the handbrake. Coolant replenishment occurred at about the same rate (and volume) as fuel replenishment. The oil system was close to total loss. Engine design had changed little since pre-war times. My present car enjoys, as they say, a charisma bypass yet I love it for its multiplicity, its matchless technology and its willingness to go. It lets me provide the soul.

Ski-ing: gateway to other pleasures

How could Keats write “Pale, latticed, chill and silent as a tomb.” having stared gloomily into his handkerchief? Perhaps because his handkerchief often got the upper hand: “And beard them, though they be more fanged than wolves or bears.” Verb. sap.

Cooking can qualify for Works Well via chemistry. Here the justification is DIY. The setting: a self-catering ski-ing holiday at Sestrière. Dramatis personae: BB and his then son-in-law. The task: creation of escalope de veau à la Zagreb from rolled-up veal, ham and cheese. The problem: despite pummelling with a wine bottle the veal refused to expand sufficiently to contain the other constituents. The solution: open up the hussif (a must on ski-ing holidays), equip a large eyed needle with linen thread, suture the veal.

Deep frying is recommended but, lacking oil, we shallow fried. As this was happening we were visited by a bouncy young woman from the ski holiday company who said, “That smells nice.” I mumbled the French phrase and she nodded: “I am impressed. Sounds as if it would be good to eat.” A pause that could only be described as pregnant developed. But we had done the work and both of us, without reference to the other, hardened our hearts against an invitation to share.

Would a woman have sutured the veal? My instinct is to say no. But this is no male supremacy kick. A woman would have been better informed as we were, the following morning, after we explained things to the butcher. “If you’d only told me I would have rendered it flattened (aplati) with this,” he said, waving his pointy-faced wooden mallet.

Just copycatting

Like James Mason (“Halifax is merely the town that spawned me.”) I have publicly renounced my West Riding birthright but am paying the price. Those years spent breathing Bradford’s uncaring air means my head colds now develop into weeks of coughing that scour my bronchia and force me into bed with that hag Catarrh. This evening I had tickets for War Requiem but I detest people who peff-peff during the quiet passages and I have given them away.

I lack the energy to be original but luckily I can fall back on a journalist’s most convenient skill: plagiarism.

Back to that cat. Here’s why quantum mechanics is such fun. At one point Dirac (whose recent biography we must all read) needed some matrix theory. Oh woo-ah but stay with me. The result was this deceptively simple equation: a x b ≠ b x a. But whatizzit? Briefly: a multiplied by b is not equal to b multiplied by a. As the hateful Richard Littlejohn would say: you couldn’t make it up.

My final paid job was to edit a logistics magazine and it’s a field strewn with pomposity. Road hauliers became logistics experts by simply changing the words on the sides of the lorries. One rolled past me today bearing the stultifying slogan: Delivering Global Solutions. Abstract and meaningless. I much prefer another outfit which specialises in transporting chickens: Poultry in Motion.

Take a trip round my head

When I said I was reading John Gribbin’s In search of Schrödinger’s cat. Plutarch said, “Regardless of the outcome of the hypothesis the poor creature must die, in its sealed box, of starvation or asphyxiation or both.” This is not true and there is good(ish) news if you accept the parallel world theory: in one world the cat is, alas, definitely, dead (from rapidly acting poison) but in another it is, happily, alive.

But here’s something else. Lacking formal instruction in ”books” I have discovered there are those I cannot read. Conrad’s Victory, Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are among them and I’m talking deep, second-page antipathy. The Conrad shames me most. Gribbin deals with quantum physics and I am severely under-educated on that too.

But then most of us are. Einstein spent thirty years writing to Niels Bohr, an über-quantist, suggesting experiments which would invalidate quantum mechanics. All were scientifically refuted. For me to read Gribbin is like dosing the baby with gin. Yet I was pulled along by a narrative tension found in the best books.

Did I understand the book? QM is possibly the hardest subject in the world and I’d be a fool to say yes. But I read on, closed in by mist most of the time but occasionally seeing the mist thin. Am I boasting (I’ve done that before)? I hope not. I’m astonished such an abstruse subject could hold my attention for 275 pages. In positive support I acknowledge I bought the book and wanted to read it. Also it is a deliberately simplified account. But what goes on in our mind when we read a book we don’t really understand?

Calling Gardener's Question Time

NUMBER THREE IN AN OCCASIONAL AND RELUCTANT SERIES Anyone mildly familiar with Works Well knows I am temperamentally unsuited to gardening. Physiologically too. My pendant stomach gets trapped between my rib-cage and my thighs; I cut a poor figure among the blooms.

But to earn sight of the rugby this afternoon I was honour-bound to garden this morning. To dig out a clump of rampant marguerites I reached for the fork but I don’t know why. Forks simply bend in the face of hard toil – a bit like me. Useless. Then I remembered the narrow-blade spade I’ve already blogged about. Unlike its bigger brother it doesn’t bite off more than it can excavate. And it’s more agile when delivering the vertical thrusts that chop the subject into manageable squares.

The marguerites (I refused my wife’s first explanation of what I’d done; even by my standards digging out daisies sounds like pie’s-ball work) are now in the green bag and my heart rate is down into the low hundreds. But someone tell me – what are forks for?

PLUS A BONUS And perhaps I needn’t wait for post-mortem paradise to be rewarded for my horticultural efforts. Remember the Cote de Beaune Villages bought in the 1990s to decorate the French house? Opened a few minutes ago, it poured out light brown, had an encouraging citrousy bouquet and tasted… like burgundy! My wife who’d agreed to taste it after I’d done so (no fool she) upped her thumb too and it’s going into a daube.

Casters - as under your old armchair

ONLY FOR OUT-AND-OUT NERDISTS. It was like meeting someone who normally wears a uniform now dressed in mufti; or a West Riding troglodyte walking down Regent Street. The mind was forced to change gear.

World economics suggest I should stick with my present car rather than replace it. But it will shortly be three years old which means an MOT, or examination of roadworthiness. I knew the tyres needed renewing since they were original and had done a remarkable 26,000 miles. Irregular wear at the front showed the wheels were misaligned so this needed doing.

The tyre guy gave me a printout of the work, adding that caster angle was marginally out of whack. Caster angle? I knew about tracking, about toe-in and about camber angle. But caster angle seemed both alien and familiar. It took me over a minute to work it out. With cars the caster angle of the wheel is a comparatively minor matter; with bikes (powered and pedalled) it’s crucial.

This chopper has an extreme caster angle. The forks reach so far forward there’s daylight between the front wheel and the engine. It wouldn’t be pleasant to steer such a bike but it would be even worse steering a two-wheeler (especially a pedal bike) with close to zero caster angle, where the forks are almost vertical. Talk about twitchy; the bike has a mind of its own.

The moral? Car drivers can forget about caster angle. Bike riders know all about it. QED.

New doors and a new sound

To the left is a new kitchen cabinet door, to the right an old. The “orphan”was mis-measured and will be replaced shortly. Lucy said it was a shame knobs were needed since the new flush-ness is the real attraction. Too late I discovered there are invisible openers whereby one simply touches the door. But with such a system one must always allow for the infant grandchild, Zach.

The renovation has changed the kitchen acoustics. Why? A close examination of the old door reveals imitation moulded ridges and a fake bronze handle. But a bigger difference is that these doors are solid wood while their replacements are possibly less absorbent veneered chipboard. Whatever, the room is more sharply resonant and would respond well to my trumpet (even if Mrs B wouldn’t) if I still owned my lip of fifty years ago.

So I sing to myself while preparing my brunch and later washing up after dinner. The repertoire belongs to the era when words were almost as important as melody. If you’re aged fifty or more, that means Rogers and Hart. And it means including the introits (not the right word, I know) that prefaced many of these great works.

Thus “Lady is a tramp” doesn’t begin with “She gets too hungry for dinner at eight.” But with a dozen-line recitative to an entirely different tune: “I’ve wined and dined on Mulligan stew and never asked for turkey, As I’ve hitched and hiked my way along from Maine to Alburquerque.” But you need a good acoustic and you need to be steeped in singers who always sang all the words: Ella and Frank. Brunch beckons.

A great - if unheralded - step forward

When computers were steam-powered I read Computer Shopper every month and imagined I understood it all. But the years rolled by, the complexities increased and my desire to understand shrivelled. I wish now I’d hung on for a little longer because during this time the USB socket/lead system was introduced.

These days USB is almost universal. From where I’m sitting I see it linking my mouse, my camera and my Skype to the computer. Round the back there are more links. Why get excited? It’s just a simple plug and socket. But it’s the word “simple” that excites me especially when I remember one of its predecessors. The dreaded Scart lead (see inset).

Scart leads still connect TVs to video recorders and once they were the standard link between printers and computers. Engaging Scart meant aligning a huge cumbersome 32-pin plug with a 32-hole socket. Bend a pin and you were done for. Now even a person interested only in poetry can unite a USB connexion. A great step forward but I’m still unaware of the theory.

IN THE INTERESTS OF SCIENCE This Cote de Beaune Villages has an odd history. Part of a clutch of cheapies it was bought for €1 at least twelve years ago to fill a hole in the wine rack at our French house. Its intended function was decorative, never gustatory. The house was sold ten years ago and this bottle ended up in a futile kitchen wine rack (Six slots vs. seventy-seven in the rack that matters) here in Herefordshire. The futile rack has been purged in the kitchen renovation and the bottle must now go. Cheap wine like this does not mature in bottles but I will taste it before disposing of the rest. Watch this space.

A case for Crop-Dad

Modified (See OS comment: Before - above; after - below)

This chap is an adolescent belonging to a jury of his peers called Keane. Recently he and the others shouted themselves hoarse at the Oh-two (sorry, can’t do the subscript) Stadium while plucking electronically-amplified guitars. Why do I know this? Younger daughter and her daughter drove to Greenwich, shouted back at the entertainment and flashed off their digitals indiscriminately.

Twas my job to trawl PhotoShop, crop their efforts and retrieve lost detail. More fun than attending the event itself. Pop musicians demand extreme cropping and I enjoyed sawing off the tops of their sweaty heads to give each his very own Massif Central. Brightness, contrast, hue and saturation tweaks on this one revealed the microphone stand, previously invisible. Great software used in a great cause: yoof culture.

THEY’VE DONE IT BEFORE! I’m impressed by companies who go the extra mile (or centimetre). The doors and drawer fronts are being replaced in our fitted kitchen. The work could not be completed in a single day but we weren’t left scrabbling access to our crocks and cutlery. Note the tape “handles” on anything that opened - replaced the following day by the specified knobs. Good on you, Lord Kytchener Kitchens (Yes, that’s the way they spell it and the explanation is quite boring.)

The furlong fights back

I marked my hundredth post with a celebration of the metric system slanted towards its technical benefits. My two-hundredth looks at the continuing metric/imperial divide

DRINK. “I can’t be bothered with litres of beer. I’ve got drunk on pints all my life.” Comment: They’re smaller - for timid drinkers.
ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM You can’t say: “Give him 2.54 centimetres and he’ll take 1.60934 kilometres.” Comment: True, it’s a cliché.
DECIMALS WOULD SPOIL SONG LYRICS: “I lurve you/A bushel and a peck/Yuh bet yur purty neck I do.” Comment: none.
…COMPLICATE COOKING: Gram cake. Comment: Don’t lose it between your teeth.
…PERMIT COAL-HEAVER FRAUD: “I asked for a ton not a tonne.”/ “So here’s a handful of slack.” Comment: First define slack. Mini-coal? Nah, too boring.
…LEAD TO SOCIAL COWARDICE: “The barman’s got arms like ham hocks. Quick, what’s a firkin in metric?” Comment: An end to Morris dancing as we know it.
GOD ORDAINED METRICS “Ten tiny fingers/Ten tiny toes.” Comment: But didn’t Anne Boleyn have six on one hand?
GOOD PR Singer Lita Roza (Dark Ages pop) re-spelled her first name to get work in Northern working men’s clubs. Comment: Yet became unfamous in the sixties.

US PROBLEMS You pave a yard, you don’t mow it. However, you can read a meter. Comment: A metric USA will arrive with worldwide suffrage.

How not to court popularity

My mention of simultaneous equations in a recent post caused Avus to groan, adding it wasn’t his subject at school. I sympathise. Also, I know full well such references lay me open to charges of showing off and poncy-ness.

Maths wasn’t my subject at school either. An essay I wrote on my preferred career admitted to journalism because it was distant from that old bromide about life being based on mathematics. Apart from the previously mentioned “techno-epiphany” my interest in maths developed much later. And even then I have added little in the way of technical competence.

No great mystery. I see maths – utterly unoriginally – as a language. As such it’s quite stunted. Beware those who talk flossily about its beauty (unless they’re Paul Dirac and he’s entitled): they’re usually poseurs. Maths is a language stripped of nuance and would be a poor basis for a poem. It’s far too clear. Lack of immediate clarity is often at the heart of great poetry.

On the other hand, clarity can taste like chilled sauvignon blanc. It’s sharp and it engages your senses. Take the social device: “How are you?” It’s not at all clear. It could mean: “I’m saying this because I’m passing you in the street.” Or (among Brits): “Don’t for goodness sake tell me about your aches and pains.” If it could be expressed mathematically we could ensure it meant, quite specifically: “I’m getting in first with this meaningless formulation because I’ve forgotten your name.”

Not a kinder world but an unambiguous one. There is no other meaning to “One over two-pi root el-cee, is the resonant frequency.” And I hope everyone’s thankful for that.

Electronics to tranquillise Zach

Now this does work and we the adults are very grateful.

For the third year running the five of us (the BBs, daughter, son-in-law and offsprig Zach) will holiday in the Languedoc. It’s a long two-day journey from Hereford and Zach’s behaviour during this ordeal has depended very much on the screen you see hanging behind the front passenger seat. As I’m sure you’ve guessed the screen is attached to a DVD player and for Zach, the unwinding autoroute is as nothing.

For me, one of two designated drivers, the tinkle of CBeebies discs endlessly recycling themelves was a small price to pay in Year One and Derek Jacobi’s soothing voice narrating In the night garden was a measure of normalcy. In Year Two I was less enamoured by The Wiggles and xenophobic tendencies had to be suppressed. This year Zach will be 3¼ and a cultural step-up is indicated. If not as far as Pulp Fiction surely he’s ripe for Citizen Kane? In the interim we shall test his ability to follow narrative.

The DVD player is plugged into an extension lead from the cigarette lighter. Another of the lead’s sockets accommodates the plug for the satnav. On the dashboard the computer calculates fuel consumption (trip and elapsed), reports the external temperature and tells us how much diesel we have left. An incredible amount of data processing whereas the only message from my Austin Cambridge in the early sixties was that I’d bought a rotten car.