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

Thursday 13 May 2010

Here's a hymn to Hob Brite

This is the Neff hob, bought for hundreds of pounds years ago. Mrs BB swears by it. Thermal reaction is the equal of any gas ring but its inestimable value is its cleanability. No wretched grease-tarnished cast-iron birds nests. Just a quick wipe with a dab of Hob Brite.

When I contemplate shelves of cleaning stuff a word springs to mind – fraud! I refuse to believe there are chemical distinctions between something said to make kitchens sparkle and one which does the same for bathrooms. Hob Brite is the exception. As well as rendering the Neff worthy of Home & Garden it removes heat-lacquered stains inside the oven’s glass door. More remarkable, given the vessel’s pimply orange-skin surface, it cleans the Le Creuset casserole. And the coffee stains in my favourite china mug disappeared in a flash. It could be based on something inimical to human life – sulphuric acid in cream form. But what the hell.

NOVEL EDITING Names. Hatch is Hatch, an immutable. But I see Clare just as clearly and she just isn’t a Lowther (always remembering this is her husband’s surname). Using Word’s find/replace I changed all 36 references to Kepler, the German mathematician, astronomer and (I’m mortified to admit) astrologer. An improvement but somewhat anonymous. Not there yet.

Dialogue. Christopher commented he wasn’t tempted to write novels because dialogue is difficult. I agree. The first awful discovery is that it isn’t spoken English it’s much more rarefied. A spoken sentence may start with “So” or “Well” but not a dialogue sentence. And here’s another

“The magazine hasn’t let you know?” asked Hester.
“No they haven’t. But I do have an interview…”


“No they haven’t.” must go.