A plague on both their houses

Shaving – a time when I look deep into my bloodhound face barely able to contain my rage at being the victim of extortion.

A razor resembles that other example of fiduciary cynicism, the computer printer: purchase price suspiciously low, running costs ludicrously high. Razor designers, sniggering, add plausible complexity. From one blade we move to two, to the swivelling head, to three blades, to slender-handled pink jobs fit only for women’s delicate hands. Marketing departments, sniggering in descant, attach childish gamebox names and give away the handle and a couple of blades for almost nothing. Then the real costs become apparent. A replacement blade can cost over £2.

The blades cut bristle, they “work well”. And, since a customer has this niggling belief he’s invested in the valueless handle, he mounts the treadmill. Over the years I have shed many of my West Riding antecedents but I still have an abiding hatred of being gulled.

I have bought alternative blades, conscious that this involves the connivance of the big players. I have bought disposables which only announce their wear by scritching the face. I have dallied with power. Fear has denied me cut-throats. I have had many lousy shaves. This is a rant. This is the end.

BB goes off the rails

THE FACELESS MALE BLOGGER
Deprived of height, of hair, of roman nose,
Of wounding agile tongue, of confidence,
Of bulky menace clad in shabby clothes,
Of old man’s manners hiding fraudulence.
I write. Remotely, tapping on my keys,
Protected by invisibility,
Safe from the snare of facial expertise,
Of smirking physical felicity.
Quite unbetrayed. The words mean what I want.
I'm handsomer and more genteel this way.
Virtual yet virtuous, tolerant,
With time to choose the soothing elegy.

Beware! This safer wordsmith’s life

Could mask a man who loves to beat his wife

Note: Initially this sonnet employed the first person singular. Worrying about the obloquy it might attract I changed it to the third person. But I fear this may not be enough. It ain't true, I tell you. Besides, the man in the inset is far better dressed. PS: Ignore the above note. Plutarch, always a constructive critic (see his comment), suggests the first person would be better. Since some of the details describe me, I think he's right. The I form goes back.

Sneaking it in by the back door

VELOCITY’S VICE
Aldous saw paintings - live - through half-blind eyes,
Took dope that opened doors on newer views,
Entrapped the pulse of Razoumovsky’s sighs,
Rendered the latest vice as headline news.
To lust and slander, filthy language, rage
Our modern world, said A, has added speed.
A vice beyond the vision of this sage
Reflective, gentle writer’s formal creed.
But in a youthful, optimistic year,
Unfettered by his cloudy mystery,
I rode astride a source of whining power,
Seeing the corner’s coming trajectory.

Contained, uncertain, in a changing state

Embracing, letting fear accelerate.

Why cider has a low profile

A rare week’s visit from grandson Ian – 23 years old, 6 ft 4 in. tall, manic computer gamer, trawler of popular music’s extremities. I expose him to Billy Bragg singing The International but he prefers one of my more obscure CD tracks - an anonymous choir doing Bandiera Rossa accompanied by a thousand bagpipes. Let’s put him down as inclining leftwards then. His pallor decrees something out-of-doors and we visit Hereford’s cider museum.

As proclaimed I respond to technology but it’s thin on the ground in cider-making. There’s a press, a bottle-washing machine and… well, that’s about it. To ensure Ian gets full value for his £3.50 ticket (as a person of advanced age mine costs £3) we are reduced to reading the info placards in some detail. It seems cider-making lacks mystique.

Industries create mystique by enshrouding themselves in jargon. But prolonged contact with apples rots the imagination. The press is called – dully – a press. Later, in an over-long explanation about reducing cloudiness, there’s a line drawing of a slightly tilted barrel on a rack. The caption reveals this process is known as “racking”.

Jargon is the route to greater earnings: think of doctors, lawyers, computer manufacturers and roof-thatchers. If cider is to prosper it must ape oenology with its vinification, maceration and its heavy dependence on French words. Since Hereford is close to the Principality Welsh words would raise obfuscation levels. Other than that… ah yes, more publicity for an aperitif (called inevitably, Apple Aperitif) bought at the museum’s gift shop. Il vaut le voyage but not if you live in, say, Prague.

More on bikes and ovens, please

POETECHNICS A lyric L-plate holder asks: Does one write a poem? Plutarch and Julia admit to techniques hardly covered by this familiar word. Lucy, in answer to a slightly different question, also reveals a variant approach. But if not write what then?

One compiles a list but this is hardly appropriate for a poem. The raw material of a compilation is surely fusty-dusty data-ish stuff. Assemble? Isn’t that what happens to the parts of a CKD Ikea table or a pile of Lego bricks en route to becoming a mini version of Buckingham Palace?

I offer refine. I know refining is a secondary process but in this case the raw materials are the contents of a big, big dictionary; by refining their nuances and their relationships a poem (verse? doggerel?) may emerge. OK, it’s a slow day at the office.

Below is a sonnet. As I commented in my previous post, adopting this format was like putting on an overcoat which conferred adulthood. Meeting the AB, AB, BC, etc, restrictions is the price paid; the benefit is the horizon shrinks from infinity to manageable proportions.

Coughing, etc
This other voice, this interruptive jolt
This inarticulate explosive bray
This unwarned auditory thunderbolt
That breaks communication by its sway.
An unkempt voice grown ragged down decades
Its origins in poisoned northern fumes
Remote from cliché comfortable glades
Enshrined in chimney stacks and rattling looms.
A wrestler’s hold that forced the primary voice
Through nostrils to evince a captious whine
Removing too the beneficial choice
Of lungs resistant to the breath’s decline

Accent, nasality and coughing can
Identify the true West Yorkshire man

BB takes the hari-kiri route

MAKING AND MADE

Each finds its master. Planed, sweet-smelling wood
Succumbs to the harder, insistent saw,

Shaped and inscribed by synthetic diamonds

Manmade pretenders from no ancient world.

New worlds release an otter-smooth handle,

Hickory heft to the chisel’s sharp thrust.

Numbers define a steel blade right-angled

Aiding precisely our carpenter needs.

Simplicity sprung from myrmidon systems

Intimate gears forcing spiraling drives

Guided by maps of blind printed circuits

Carry a force that restrains and impels

Ultimate beat; the heart of production

Obedient yet to higher commands,

Hidden within the step-function action,

Muscle and sinew to master the switch.

Note: My apologies for flagging this such a long time ago. Its appearance was delayed because, in the interim, Julia had to teach me how to write a poem. Blame for its imperfections should be directed at me not at her for this - let's call it, verse - may well deserve the cliché judgement involving purses and sow's ears. Or possibly horse's...

Picture copyright 2001 by Jim Wilson

Hamlet was such a comfort

THE GOLDEN AGE IS NOW When we were very poor I took a part-time evening job behind a bar in a Tottenham pub. After three nights I resigned. Incompetence was the main reason but, also, for the first time I had to remain clear-eyed while others lapsed into crapulousness. Oh what a (badly put-together) piece of work is man.

These were pre-decimal days. To price “a brown and mild” I had to halve a pint of mild beer (at 1s 11d) and add it to a bottle of brown ale (1s. 3½d) – in my head. And there would be equal gymnastics concerning a gin and tonic or a port and lemon. When I resigned the landlord’s wife told me I wasn’t cut out for this work. In the words of Paul Simon “I took some comfort there”.

Nowadays bar-tending is a doddle. The cash register works it out and for the innumerate touch-key icons augment mere figures. If I were wiped out financially I could present myself for duty at The Dog and Duck, confident that technology would be my crutch. But being able to watch bright-eyed, shouty young men wheedling drinks out of the local second-hand car dealer (a roll of tenners in his back pocket) would be another matter.

WRITING: CRAFT NOT ART
Eclogue 46: English is a plum pudding of different words.
Example: Cyrano: So, insult me. Intellectually inadequate aristocrat: You have… a big nose. Cyrano: Ah, what could you have said? When it bleeds… a river (steps over imaginary river). When it’s blown, a hurricane. Etc, etc.

Caution: Go out there and delight in “jejune” and “mellifluous” while simultaneously exploring the one short step into pretentiousness.

Awake, for morning in the bowl of night

It’s just a digital clock and it cost £8 twelve? fifteen? years ago. It has an alarm system which is never used and a dot which appears for PM and disappears for AM. Years ago the snooze button became wonky and is now held down with Sellotape (US: Scotch Tape). It sits on a chest of drawers at Mrs B’s side of the bed and I view its display turned through ninety degrees since I tend to lie in bed rather than sit up. As a result at 1:08 I see a clown with a wide open mouth, wearing a bow tie.

It was bought when we were elderly. Now we are old it plays a more important role. Sleep is a more fugitive experience and for some reason I’ve never fathomed there’s something smugly satisfying about being able to tell myself it’s now 3.15 AM and I haven’t yet slept a wink.

In the guest bedroom there’s a much more advanced clock which keeps time by tuning to radio transmissions, thus allowing for the hour going backwards and forwards and for leap years.

A related device played a more significant part in our lives when we lived in the Philadelphia suburbs and I had an early train to catch. This time the alarm was operative and switched on a radio. But what music works best for an aubade? Not classical. A Gymnopédie is tolerable but Sibelius Four proved too much of a jolt. In the end I found an MOR station playing the blandest of the bland. I backed off the volume until my transition from Morpheus to Clifton Heights was jolt-free. I once switched on the radio during the daytime I found myself unable detect hardly any sound at all from the loudspeaker.

Calling all aesthetes

Been swimming in uncharted water. Poetry is undoubtedly exhilarating but I’m returning for an inflatable life jacket. By which I’m assuming my role as John the Baptist for metal things, for operating systems, for power tools and for the unconsidered technical minutiae of the kitchen. With Avus drinking tinnies in Western Australia I am resurrecting a subject certain to generate a blogwide storm of apathy. Motorbikes.

Except they’re only the jumping-off point. The game is really aesthetics and started with a TV commercial. I am not a lover of these noisy intrusions and since 1984, when I first acquired a remote control, I have always pressed the Mute button when they appear. But there is no button to suppress, temporarily, the images.

In a lengthy commercial charting Honda’s contributions to powered travel a tantalising five or six seconds show a close-up of a Honda racing bike (ca. 1967) followed by a helicopter shot of that bike at speed on a dead-straight road flanked on both sides by lethal trees. My mind clicked up: “racing bike” and “beauty”.

Above is champion racer Jim Redman aboard a six-cylinder Honda 250 cc machine. The thrill for me lies in the sinuous side view of the fairing which starts at the transparent top forming Jim’s “windscreen”, draws backward awhile, rushes forward to accommodate the tips of the handlebars and then sweeps majestically back again – a curve that achingly proclaims velocity – to be unsatisfactorily resolved in two straight bits accommodating Jim’s knees and feet. No other bike has ever quite duplicated this line of beauty. Just thought you’d like to know.

A stimulating chat with your medic

I revel in conversation, most of it mano e mano but not from choice. Certain of my behavioural traits generate an antipathy that is most noticeable among wives (female partners, female co-mortgagees) of friends and acquaintances. Mrs B offers an explanation which I more or less go along with and I accept the failing as ineradicable. But how to widen the field?

Doctors are one answer. They’re articulate, they listen and at my age encounters are always just around the corner. I start the ball rolling with a carefully prepared and – most important – unexpected question. The links between vasectomies and prostate cancer forced one GP to admit he’d had a vasectomy and he wasn’t worried. Another GP explained why the labyrinthine diagnostic procedures in the TV series House are fraudulent.

The subjects must be technical (fine by me) and the talk limited (other patients waiting). But doctors are full of stuff that is of no interest to most patients and enjoy discharging it in short bursts. The House GP, above, got carried away and had to close an ever more recondite discussion of molecules with “But that’s telling you more than you need to know.” When I published a community magazine he allowed me to sit in on one of the practice’s bull sessions as the basis for an article.

It helps if you’re curious about things. The man who paved the area in front of our house with bricks was keen to talk about his wide-ranging skills. As are some car mechanics although here the initial question must be designed to appeal to their amour propre. I’m sorry about the wives but as they say up north, “I’m making do.”

White goods features lie fallow

I’m making do with Windows XP. For me Vista’s siren song is shrill and I suspect lasts longer than the Ring cycle. Vista has also had a bad press.

Eventually Microsoft will force us all to accept to accept Vista or its Elastoplast-ed (US: Band Aid-ed) successor. And we know what that means. A load of features aimed at seven Kazhakstan users; we’ll never identify their existence let alone use them. But this addition of unnecessary bells and whistles isn’t confined to software. It happens in the kitchen. Mrs B has never used the following features:

FOOD PROCESSOR Citrous presser, midi bowl, plastic dough blender, egg whisk with two paddles.
MICROWAVE Sensor cooking, auto weight cooking (sub-divided into Fresh fish, Fresh veg, Boiled potatoes, Jacket potatoes, and many more).
WASHING MACHINE 40 deg jeans, 60 deg ordinary wash, 90 deg boil wash, 60 deg plus pre-wash, Easy care.
NEFF SUPER-DOOPER OVEN Conventional top and bottom heat, Bread-baking position, Bottom heat, Dough-proving setting.

Has anyone – out of a spirit of scientific curiosity – used all the features on any culinary appliance other than an electric kettle?

POEM – latest. Info exchange between versifier and editor. I suggest Julia’s contributions are colour-coded imperial purple with mine in workaday black. Julia says it would distract.

On sealants and scansion

Bonden Minor re-sealing the work surface/wall junction in the Bonden Major kitchen. Theoretically Minor is down for the Hereford Borderlines Film Festival but Major usually twists his arm (a form of noblesse oblige between brothers) into some form of DIY.

The work had its own Damascene moment. Both of us have had disasters before, with silicone plastered to excess round the relevant areas. The answer is to define the area, top and bottom, with masking tape. Then peel away the tape almost immediately afterwards. Preparing the junction takes, say, ninety minutes; applying the sealant takes less than ten. Both the kitchen and the similarly treated bath now look unobtrusively professional.

THE POEM. Julia goes to work – part one. Three attempts to email Julia my unnamed sixteen-liner. None bridged the gap between Hereford and Prague. Why? Because a Prague filter dumped each attempt into a spam waste-bin. Let’s hope this isn’t symbolic.

Finally the grist arrives for Julia’s mill. First instruction: “Write out in prose what (you’re) trying to say, as if… describing it to a class of third graders. Next highlight the fun inner bits, the nuggets the poem is wrapped around. Then look at the prose description and double check if those nuggets are contributing to the meaning, or are getting in the way.”

Hard-nosed sense. Deep down I know the narrative is blurred in verse three. The summary will confirm this. I now enter the post-sealant reconstruction phase.

Truck and Alain score. Poem on trial

AUTHENTICITY PAYS OFF Grandchild Zach’s birthday. At the toyshop, he was eased away from an 80 cm tractor/harrow combination and guided towards a 400D John Deere articulated dump truck. For which Mrs B handed over a breathtaking £25. This diecast model, 50 cm long, is replete with technical detail but would Zach respond to its authenticity?

The answer was yes. He pushed it slowly along the coffee table apparently revelling in its well-mounted wheels. He tilted the cab up and down. He tipped precisely, allowing the bricks to slide off without commotion. Heck, he can grow up to lead a rock band if he wishes but I was heartened by his response to a well-made – almost adult - toy.

ALAIN, YOU’RE OK Plutarch quoted from Alain de Botton’s recent “The pleasures and sorrows of work”, celebrating the delights of technology. Although I was impressed by his “How Proust can change your life” I fear I responded robustly, implying he was slumming. I was wrong. In a related essay in New Statesman de Botton uses the role of the spotter (of trains, lorries, etc) as a way of scrutinising industrial culture.

“When we think of tourist destinations we don’t think of the places of work,” he writes. “Why, endowed as they are with both practical importance and emotional resonance, do cargo ships, port facilities, airport warehouses, storage tanks, refineries and assembly plants go unnoticed?” Because they require new eyes.

THE POEM Accused justifiably of being a teaser, I report that this was finally completed and has been emailed to Julia who will decide whether it sees the light of day.