A sense of touch

Rock climbing
Let you and I decode this wall of Braille
Which hides its clues in its rugosity
A ciphered invitation to prevail
Against the sullen pull of gravity.

Probe fingers test the nature of the holds
From edges that release a grateful bite
To hanging shallow spoons on polished folds
Where faith and friction are the keys to height.

Below, those self-same holds now yield to feet,
A changing notion of security,
From hands that pull to legs that, driving, beat
The weighty torso’s dead proclivity.

The rope’s symbolic link from waist to soul,
A nylon thread of voice that simply tells
Of sharing, unity and safe control,
Hangs motionless above the bedlike fells.

Now - on this barer face - the mind reacts
To heightened thoughts of flight and rustling air,
While scanty touch of hand and feet distracts
The will from this, our self-inflicted dare.

But here’s a move that cannot be reversed
The crux that separates two points in time
I take the step that leaves the past dispersed
Embrace the new and justify the climb.

NOTE Amateurish and, even sadder, obvious. But then I was a fearful and incompetent climber too. The aim is to move on to freer, idiomatic, even slangy verse which does not rhyme. The problem then will be to distinguish between my prose and my verse.

QUESTION
(left) What happened next?

SAUSAGE FORK
Downey Engineering of Pontrilas say the prototype of this revolutionary device will cost £20. However, we're shortly off on holiday so the R&D phase is some weeks hence.

Can numbers be romantic?

My father had a gregarious yet authoritative style which would have suited the armed services during WWII. Profound deafness prevented this so he joined the Royal Observer Corps, spending time with other disqualificatees (mainly businessmen) on windswept Otley Chevin, north of Bradford, noting aircraft movements and acting as first-line visual defence against aerial invasion.

ROC members had to tell good planes from bad and this spilled over domestically. From five to ten I was sucked in and read the necessary publications more avidly than my father, becoming fairly good at what he did. (I may have passed on the appropriate gene: my elder daughter, having beaten her sword into a ploughshare, could differentiate between a Ford Zephyr and a Ford Zodiac, an extreme distinction which depends mainly on a few strips of chrome trim.)

My skills would not have impressed a similarly indoctrinated young American. To me the most iconic (Hate the word but can’t escape it here) US fighter plane was a Mustang which he would have called a P-51. Moving to bombers my four-engine Liberator would have been his B-24. This numerical nomenclature still prevails among US vintage plane fans. A minor mystery, especially since many of the best-known American planes had good memorable names: Corsair, Lightning and Vengeance (manufactured by the equally memorable company, Vultee.)

But not all. The Brewster Buffalo was actually a fighter. Funnily enough its tubby fuselage hinted at the eponymous herbivore. Also an uncertain image springs to my mind when someone says Flying Fortress (US: B-17); all those bricks and mortar! This must seem like the Punic Wars to many bloggers. PS: The silhouette pic is a Macchi, an unlikely visitor to Otley Chevin.

Bank Holiday trifle

Villanelle – Soccer fan

No, look within, this is your darker state
Flagged by the scarf you wear so forwardly
A sentient step towards the insensate.

Having forsworn the gift of human freight
To co-exist, reflect, reach out, then see.
No, look within, this is your darker state.

Instead you urge yourself to harm and bate
The scarves outside your damned fraternity.
A sentient step towards the insensate.

Your sport’s an artificial form of hate
Whipped by the branches of your tribal tree
No, look within, this is your darker state.

For those whipped scarves you attribute their fate
To mythic signals from an enemy.
A sentient step towards the insensate.

But when the tumult clears, fears re-create
The prior world you left so eagerly,
A world away from this, your darker state,
The blinding darkness of the insensate.

NOTE. The villanelle is called a Poetic Trifle in Brewer’s “Art of versification” but it can rise to greater things. Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle…” is a villanelle. Nuff said.

The first and third lines from verse one are repeated throughout. So, fewer lines to write, I thought. It was only after the tenth re-write I dimly began to realise their potential.

This is a joint exercise with Plutarch. The first version, which I have retained, is terrible. Like Julia, Plutarch pointed the way to improvements and I stumbled on, ending up with what you can see. Interestingly both critics frequently drew my attention to defects which, in my heart of hearts, I knew were there and yet I pretended to be blind to. This is the essence of saying: you know you can do better. And this is the best form of encouragement. My gratitude to Plutarch here, and Julia earlier.

Adieu for a while.

When BB was an unlikeable bb

Recently The Crow posted about calligraphy. I mentioned my interest but said it had always been beyond my uncertain hand and that I was flogged repeatedly at school for bad penmanship. This horrified her and she asked what sort of school I had attended. Well, it was fee-paying and, despite my cowardice, I could see some link between the crime and the punishment. What was less easy to accept was when I was flogged for having feet that were bigger than those of the geography master. Lucy admitted herself guiltily amused by this.

The Crow has reason to attach emotional content to handwritten letters and urged me to consider leaving mementos more permanent than a million forgotten emails to my daughters and grandchildren. I may well do this, always assuming I believe they can read what I’ve written. But my memory was sprung. Upstairs in the loft is a box the size of two house-bricks, packed with the letters I sent my mother during my two years’ national service.

While I was training in Wiltshire I had my portable and typed everything. In Singapore I was reduced, like everyone else, to airmail sheets. These consist of very thin paper and I suspect the ballpoint ink has migrated. The letters are over fifty years old and I have never read them since I slipped them into the postbox at RAF Seletar. I was a callow, cynical, self-regarding airman (qualities which have not entirely disappeared) and I am pretty sure I do not want to re-visit that version of myself. However, perhaps my descendants may enjoy examining the feet of clay belonging to the authoritarian figure who impinged irregularly on their lives.

I get the feeling this wasn’t what The Crow had in mind.

Vlad the almost unbelievable

Sonnet – Forked tongue
The mirrored Vlad said this: My thoughts proclaim
My genius, I write at least with “talent”,
(Ironic quotes to mark a word so tame)
But childish chat is my profound lament.

No media man, he asked inquisitors
To write their questions on prosaic cards
Then, face to face, the hopeful auditors
Endured a long exchange for dull rewards.
The eccentricity was rightly earned:
While Luzhin and The Gift were Russian born,
Lolita’s acid laughs, so deftly turned,
Blow like a zestful Yankee auto horn.*
Oddness explains a dearth of oral skill;
Two voices make speech harder to distil.

NOTE I have Plutarch’s authority for using a rhyming dictionary. Rhyming, he says, is an artificial constraint and therefore this is not cheating. One of the several online dictionaries I use threw up the bizarre final three words of the asterisked line. It seemed ungracious to reject this Autolycan gift.

Fitting a doo-dah to the job

Ergonomics has nothing to do with ergo (therefore); it’s a latin/greek trick. The prefix is greek for work and the whole word is the study of man in his workplace. A comfortably grabbable kettle might well have been caressed by an ergonomist but easy to use doesn’t always mean nice to look at. The target rifle above no doubt fits the shoulder of the shooter (it’s adjustable) but it’s hardly elegant.

Ergonomics is often central to industrial efficiency, something I was supposed to know about when I was paid to write. A seminar on the subject I attended proved to be a reverse example of how careful design can help people do their job.

The seminar started – as many do – with a complete cock-up of what Americans call show-and-tell. Slides appeared upside down, in the wrong order, “flopped” or just not at all. Using the projector was non-intuitive; its ergonomics had not been tuned for the non-expert human. Speakers rested notes on a lectern that was too steeply raked; the notes repeatedly slipped off. Hilariously the microphone dangled from a necklace loop; when handed over, the next speaker had hell’s own job getting the loop over his head.

Journalism often means profiting from others’ mistakes. I reported the seminar straightforwardly, then added a comment piece. The Society of Ergonomists replied with a rueful letter which we published. During my career I attended many seminars on many subjects and I’ve forgotten them all. But not that one. Definitely a do-as-I-say, not -as-I-do.

Belated tribute

Sonnet – Virginia Mayo “Colorado Territory”

Her blonde largesse is proof that God was there,
A nabob said, ignoring that His child
Spoke woodenly and lacked the mobile flair
To match the grace by which her looks beguiled.
A Venus paid to bathe in froth, or play
A pallid version of reality;
Foil to a vulgar comic’s roundelay
Or soft support for muscularity.
She did what sleek-set men told her was best
Which was what other staring men would want,
Til later, stripped of rouge and coarsely dressed,
She died – on film – with passion triumphant
Within a canyon, and beyond the curse
Of beauty measured by a banal purse.

NOTE Written on paper! With a ballpoint! On the Newport – Paddington express! But, as always, MsW helped resolve a flat penultimate line back home. Hurray for railways (Re-read “The Importance of Being Ernest” on the e-book reader on the return journey); even bigger hurray for computers.
UNRELATED NOTE Blogging with someone is the perfect preparation for lunching with them a year later. The conversation dives straight into the stuff that matters, like what constitutes a print. Dramatis personae: Marja-Leena with Fred, BB, Mrs BB.

The clothes proclaim the (versatile) man

Miltonian sonnet* - Gavin Hewitt: TV news reporter

Dull dust-blown shoes stand in eternal dust.
The denim shirt surrounds a thickened neck.
The précis matched against time’s rigid check
Broadcasts a message countering mistrust.
Distant the filthy disagreeing clouds
Pall grievously another killing war
The dead are food for deadline’s avid maw
Screens flicker, forecasting advancing shrouds.
But now the shirt’s exchanged for coat and tie,
With news of banks and theories just revealed.
Switch to a scarf, windproof, light-glimmered eye
Provincial murder now requires his art.
From that square face an instinct to impart
The hack’s quick truthfulness of wounds unhealed.

(* eg, To Mr Lawrence).

NOTE. Ughh, far too hard for an amateur. The seemingly random distribution of the rhymed lines after the first two quatrains left me unbelayed. Why, Milton, why?

Music's beautiful technology

Music dishes out joy, tears and, occasionally, the sensation of stepping on a stair that wasn’t there. Take the first two sung lines of this Everly Brothers song:

Bye bye, love.
Bye bye, happiness
Both get the same guitar accompaniment but the first line is two syllables shorter than the second. To me, a musical ignoramus, the effect is strange. When I sing those lines an impulse deep within tries to force me me to complete the first line verbally – with a “di-dah” or by stretching out “lo-o-ove”.

I wanted to know: how the absence of those two syllables is represented on the score, and what effect the brothers were hoping for. A case for The Prague Polymath. Because I phrased my email so clumsily PP answered a different question, raising a much more interesting musical matter which I hope to return to. However, she also provided a link to the score.

For me musical notation could be Choctaw. But finally I traced the “missing” words to two symbols: a scribble and a backwards-way-round lower case r. Googling “music symbols” brought the answer: a quaver rest and a crotchet rest. Hurray for the ignoramus. As to my other question PP has a theory which I’m still studying.

But my point is one of simple revelation: the precision with which music is set down. Having made my infantile discovery I became aware – not for the first time – of how inexact words are compared with this other language. The technology of music. Briefly I played The Tin Ear’s Lament – oh, how I’d love to speak that language. Then I went away and mangled a poem.

Curbing the bending tendency

Another giant step for mankind is imminent and Works Well readers will be informed before anyone else. The new technology resolves a problem British sausage-eaters have wrestled with for decades – the moment when the object of their desires ceases to be a cylinder and opts to become a banana.

There are no doubt good reasons why a sausage, sensing the heat of the frying pan, curls up as if returning to the womb. But for once the physics doesn’t interest me. I am concerned only with the irritating necessity of rotating an assymetrical body through three 90-deg. steps to ensure equally distributed browning (as evidence of having been cooked).

And yes I know such browning can be achieved by baking or roasting the sausages tightly fitted into a small tray with a raised rim. Mrs B. has often done this and I like the result. But such sausages differ from those fried; for one thing the skin is hardened, for another some of the juice dries up.

My solution is hardly revolutionary. Imagine the business end of a small garden fork without the handle. Six 6-in. long x 3 mm wide tines, just over 1 in. apart. The circular cross-section tines, welded up from stainless steel, are inserted longitudinally into the sausages providing an inflexible “backbone” to each. Rotation becomes a simple finger job. I called Downey Engineering of Pontrilas (Tel: 01981-240427) and asked if they were interested. They said they were “provided we get one the sausages”. Watch this space.

Voie sans issue

En essayant saisir le francais
Un rosbif se trouve perturbé.
Mais son prof dit, “Bien sur,
J’ai une méthode moins dur,
On doit trancher le gorge de l’anglais.”

NOTE: C'est une andouillette.

Stupidity leads to rewarding chat

My garage doors are 83 in. wide; my car 78 in. That’s 2½ in. clearance on either side of the wing mirrors. Believe me, it looks less.

Entering and leaving the garage are just one problem. Inside, I ease the car inches to the left so I can open the driver’s door. Chalk marks on the wall help position the car longitudinally; carpet attached to both walls protects the bodywork. For ten years I have managed these mini-journeys successfully but three days ago I scratched the offside front wing (US: fender) on a quite different variant of the exit route.

The man at Auto Chips said it would cost £150. I thought the rate was about £40. “That’s if you’re shortly going to sell the car. If you’re keeping it you need something permanent.” My aim was to obliterate evidence of my own stupidity so I opted for the latter. I asked questions and he answered them fully, pleased at my interest.

The higher cost covers repainting the whole wing and then drying it in an oven. While it’s still on the car! We stood in a car-size chamber heated to 75 deg F. “People get the wrong idea about our oven,” he said, grinning. There was more. He knew his stuff and enjoyed explaining it in detail. It was (professionally), and still is, one my great pleasures to talk to a communicative expert – on anything.

I told Mrs B that the car was destined for the inside of an oven. “Remember to take the long-distance sweets (US: candy) out of the door compartments,” she said.

Time to get out of the poetry game

WHY I AM UNFITTED FOR, AND PROFESSIONALLY PREVENTED FROM,WRITING POETRY
The Rubik Cube is not my sport. The sides
Proclaim restraint, the shape a symmetry.
The garish colours act as childish guides
The aim a transient diversionary.
To write a verse, to form a brick of words
To take on rules that help to close our eyes,
To rhyme (like this) and risk what rhyme affords
We tumble into wretched compromise.
The language of a verse demands a blur
Else why not take the compass point of prose?
Why hint, evade, constrain, fail to concur
When truth and clarity all worth enclose?

For truth and clarity are hard-won gain
And fall in rhythmic rhyming’s false domain.