12.30 - 2.30 pm - we are invisible

While we had the house in France my heroes were le plombier, le menuisier (a carpenter on steroids), and le maçon (forget hammer and chisel; this guy could build you a house). All have been feted in Works Well and their brows bound with laurels.

I am more equivocal about le zingueur - technically a zinc worker, more exactly a roofer. (I should add I ignored l’ébéniste, never having needed a hand-carved witch-doctor’s mask in African hardwood.) Drefféac’s zingueur, who had a comical surname which I’m damned if I can remember, was extremely hard to find. Desperate I knocked on his door just as he was about to lunch, a solecism few Brits unfamiliar with France would comprehend.

Monsieur, he shrugged, fighting to contain himself, le téléphone. But I didn’t have a French landline and this pre-dated mobiles. I wasn’t an enthusiast before and seeing his lunch-table was set with something red poured into chunky Cristal d’Arques glasses which inhibit wine appreciation put me off even more.

For me zingueur resonates with tzigane (gypsy) and M. Zincman might have had nomadic blood. His thick curly hair looked like a football into which his head had been partially inserted. His dangling arms and simian gait equipped him well for scrambling up ladders. Although he'd done other jobs for me he refused to suggest a solution to a leaky roof over the lean-to section of the house (see pic). Several years after we sold I stopped to view the house’s exterior noting the lean-to section had a new roof. The Irish buyer had had no French and it’s possible the roof represented M. Zincman’s revenge for that interrupted lunch.

Cobblestones from the Czech Republic

LOST IMAGES The half-a-dozen photos I took in Prague with my mobile phone appear to be irretrievable (hence improvisation above). Damn technology. The only shot I miss occurred in a restaurant where I ordered Grandmother’s Leek and Potato Soup in a Bread Bowl. And that’s how it came – soup contained in a hollowed-out disc-shaped loaf. Was I supposed to eat the loaf as well? The waiter shrugged dismissively.

MEMORIALS? In Paris and London history caught up long ago; in Prague it’s still being written. At the city’s Museum of Communism a film prefaces the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Slightly older versions of the youths being cracked on the head by the security forces (“Don’t hit women,” one of them shouts) are to be seen on today’s streets, free if not gilded with life’s luxuries. On those same streets magnificent fin de siècle terraces are interspersed with dirigiste egg-boxes imposed by the then Soviet masters. Should they be torn down or left as mementoes of the country’s second imprisonment after the Nazis?

NOT IN THE ROOM Our hotel is called Design Hotel Elephant. And why not? But I’d like to rearrange the words.

TITANIA’S DRINK Sitting in a rapaciously priced Old Town bar waiting for the clock tower to reveal its wonders (disappointing – the homunculi don’t emerge) we order Rose Drink (0.1 l of rose (not rosé) wine, strawberries, mint, rose petals, water) because it costs a mere £0.75. “A nice summer drink,” says Mrs BB. She’s right.

A TOUR AVOIDED From the same bar I see a tourist office decorated externally with large gilt words apparently alluding to the events of 1989: DILIGENTIA – DIGNITATIS – MEMORES – OPTIMA INTENTI. The last two worry me. Aren’t they paving stones on the road to Hell?

I am middle-class, honest

On the left, our Kingston-upon-Thames 1930s semi, sold in 1998. The estate agent noted the property had been modernised “but would benefit from some cosmetic redecoration.” - in other words the vendor’s a slob. ‘Twas a mercy the buyer was desperate and didn’t give a damn.

Twelve years on, scarred by that unkind judgment, I search our present house (new when we moved in) for tasks to prove I’m a caring owner. More and more obscure tasks, it seems. I paid right royally to have the brick driveway installed but now I’m faced with sealing it. Why? I had hoped sealing would inhibit weed growth. It doesn’t. In Tudor England, lacking a driveway, Sir Thomas More flogged himself with a leather whip. Times have changed but I don’t rule out a visit to the tack shop.

LOOK ON MY WORKS… I love France, inordinately, irrationally, irredeemably. I used to think of the USA as the Can-Do country but France is up there. The Millau bridge (already posted) provides grand proof, but here’s humdrum evidence. This low-loader carrying a gigantic yacht has been forced into the centre of a country road and is virtually brushing the plane trees on either side. The latter suggest that this could only be l’Hexagone, but there’s more. The lorry bears the rubric Convoi Exceptionnel. Many more syllables than Long Load, much more style.

POP-UP PERSECUTION It may be a penance for Windows 7 users but is anyone else suffering from the insistent Windows Live Messenger pop-up? It demands I sign up for the service which, as far as I can see, makes me subservient to Microsoft for the rest of my natural. Recommendations?

As I take up my sledgehammer

Making a metaphorical garden shed. Cut down a tree to make one of the corner posts. Too short so cut down another. Start squaring tree trunk but break off to mix concrete for base; work again on trunk and find concrete has set in mixer. Discard; mix more. Decide suddenly on walls half brick, half timber. Lay bricks and find concrete base is incompatible with brick pattern; adjust base with sledgehammer. Decide to re-orient the shed through 90 deg...

No it isn't a garden shed, it's a novel. And the above is a behind-the-scenes analogy about why that small para appears at the end of recent blogs. Some people who read this blog know the background; others deserve an explanation. Eight years ago I wrote about 7000 words of a novel and decided in September this year to resume. Three of my incomparable "links" volunteered to read what I'd written, one was more or less forced to. The judgement (albeit expressed much more politely) was it was saveable crap. The 7000 words were re-written, given a cautious thumbs up and more has followed.

I had hoped to pass out succeeding chapters to the links but, after a shaky start, I had to renege. Plot developments kept on forcing me to re-shape the tree trunk, and apply the sledgehammer. When I'm more confident I have something that's half permanent I'll try and resume.

The plot concerns the plight of a production engineer who has the misfortune to be working during the Thatcher era. This is intertwined with a contrasting story about... well I haven't told anyone about that yet. An interesting sideline is the potential race against senility this project represents. May I remind everyone I'm 74.

Novel progress 28/11/09. Ch.6: 0 words. Chs. 1 - 5A: 22,938 words. Comment: Hatch returns.

Mankind's great leaps

“It is difficult to design an ugly bridge,” wrote John Betjeman in The Spectator, a lifetime ago. “But the people responsible for the M1 managed it.” He was quite right. Those motorway crossings are the arse-ends of block houses. True, Britain has put up the Humber, the second Severn and the Dartford, but I have lived in two countries where great bridges are a casual fact of life.

No need to blow the Golden Gate’s trumpet; tolls are only payable into San Francisco not out, my first experience of this municipal snobbism. But the Gate tends to overshadow the much lower, much longer (7 miles) San Mateo bridge where, frequently, your car is virtually at one with the watery surface of the upper bay.

Switch east and I left the USA on the SS France, gazing up, sure the ship’s telecoms mast would scrape the underside of the Verrazzano Narrows bridge south of New York. It didn’t. Where I’d been living, in Pittburgh, was the Bridge to Nowhere where a planning foul-up left this coathanger more of a pier than a bridge for a decade. Being profligate with bridges, that’s real profligacy.

France is the other heavy hitter. The dizzying St Nazaire, bestriding the Loire estuary, suddenly became a free ride when the authorities decided that toll-payers had paid enough. And – without fanfare – Calais to the Normandy coast became a mere step and a half when the mouth of the Seine was bridged in a high arc at Honfleur.

But to match engineering with artistic splendour cross the Massif Central and approach the Millau viaduct: seven mystical yachts with powerful flashing mast-lights visible from ten miles away. A Brit designed it but it was the French who said “Yes!”

Novel progress 12/11/09 (Working title: The damaged con-rod). Chs. 1, 2, 3, 3A (Interlude), 10,874 words. Ch. 4 - 1900 words. Nearly 2000 words in two days - must be bad