One reason why I blog

I’ve touched on technology and aesthetics before but clumsily, not getting to the heart of the matter.

Take a power drill. One can enclose the works in a multicoloured, smoothly shaped plastic shell making it prettier. But that’s simply giving a doll a new set of clothes. What I’m struggling for is something that looks good because of what it does.

My poor old metalworking vice – not used much these days as you can see – is, of course, required to hold workpieces securely. More interestingly, it must be designed so that I may get to any oddly shaped workpiece with a saw, a drill, a file and so on. To ensure this accessibility unnecessary metal is removed from the vice jaws.

As a result both jaws emerge from curving neck-like structures. The shape of these structures is functional but pleasing. The curves are there because those type of curves work best. And that premise is often a useful definition of beauty in other unassumingly attractive objects.

I'm ashamed about the condition of the vice, though.

Nuts and bolts not bad for your intellect

I am gritting my teeth. In seeking to right an oft-repeated wrong I must first claim some liberal arts credentials. Well, I left school at 15 for journalism and that was a good start. Since then I have read Proust, listened more than once to the Grosse Fuge, bought a quintet of Almodovar DVDs and would kill to own a Turner.

Does that do it? Now let me turn on the idiots who made this self-aggrandisement necessary.

Most reviewers, notably those doing TV, major on liberal arts. This is obvious when something technical crops up. If the guy driving round the world in a Deux Chevaux describes how he bodged up a broken suspension, that’s boreeng darlings. Tell us more about your fears, your incipent gay-ism and what you feel about all those colourful natives. Feelings count, not track rods.

It gets worse. It’s not just antipathy but a celebration of ignorance. These people, limited to a book-bound world, revel in not knowing what a track rod is. As if knowing would diminish their crystal-pure thoughts on Derrida. Needless to say they were all at sea when “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance” was published.

Am I finished? Yes, that’s it. Track rods resume soonest.

How to soften a rude subject

NEW READERS: Please read the third comment before the post itself. Just to spare my blushes.
I am a connoisseur – though not an intentional user – of euphemisms. We call it a loo while Americans call it a can. That says a lot; genteel plays hard-nose. Ironically the American seeing someone (vs going out with in the UK) hints at an occasional Yankee preference for gentility.

My brother (DIY perfectionist and good cook) has a caravan. Now he’s completed the Land’s End to John O’Groats walk he is taking it to Scotland as a base to resume his assault on the Munros (peaks over 3000 ft). There are some 240 and he’s down to the last twenty.

To limber-up he was in the Brecon Beacons and we had lunch. Afterwards, driven by my taste for euphemism, I inspected his caravan. In particular the technology of the bathroom – the middle-class US alternative for can. Fanatical design effort ensures that when he discharges accumulated waste from his temporary home the caravanner only handles advanced and utterly hygienic products of the plastics industry.

This system is called a cassette. Think of the images that evokes and you’ll agree with me it’s a perfect euphemism.

Knowing what not to fear

Some people have an instinct for technology. Richard, one of my earliest friends, born a week before me and only a mile away, dead these last ten years from horrible motor neurone disease, had that instinct.

The proof could take a terrifying form. When my brother ran the bearings on the engine of his Morris Minor Richard supervised the removal of the engine, its dismantlement, the replacement of the crankshaft and the bearings, the reassembly and the reinstallation. My only contribution – other than the loan of my bathroom floor to accommodate this work – was not to drop the engine when it was put back into the car and my brother and Richard were unable to contribute any further lifting effort during the last foot or so of the transfer.

Here’s where the magic happened. With everything connected and a sump full of new oil, the engine was started. Brmmm…brmm. Fine, apart from the oil light glowing bright red on the dash. Alarmed, I reached in to switch off the ignition but Richard shook his head. Dipping under the raised bonnet he shook the engine on its mountings - vigorously. And the oil light went out.

How could he know that?

One foot on, one foot off

The hippety-hoppety antics required to propel a scooter (the children's version not a Vespa clone) surely rules it out as a serious mode of locomotion. Or does it?

The Swedes don't think so and they're pretty serious about most things. They use them for personal transport in high-bay warehouses.

The normal way of getting around a warehouse is by some kind of forklift. But that's wasteful if your journey doesn't require you to extract or re-install a load. Imagine instead a scooter rather like this but scaled up for a full-grown adult. Notably with larger diameter wheels. No brakes needed.

The floors of high-bay warehouses are deliberately made smooth so that forklifts can be aligned precisely with individual bays in the racking. Perfect for scooting. As I watched one dashing Nordic individual, with flowing yellow locks, hip-hop off into the distance it looked like fun. But perhaps that's also the drawback. In Britain we're not inclined to think of work as fun.

A hedge is much more than a fund

THIS IS FOR PLUTARCH. We're rather good at hedges in the Marches. This one is to be found at Little Brampton, also home of Aardvark Books. To techno-legitimise the inclusion of this pic here are three questions:

(1) Who on earth trims this hedge? It is over 100 m long and about 10 m high.
(2) What is the trimmer's strategy? The hedge surface is like a contoured model of the Peak District stuck on its side. Is each bulge and declivity faithfully followed?
(3) What tools are used? Given the hedge's dimensions a powered trimmer would seem likely. Given its surface variations manual shears would be more nimble.

The photograph only captures part of the hedge which acts as a boundary to the village church graveyard. It captures almost nothing of its grandeur. A mysterious aristocrat of a hedge.

Older people take more time

For the last eighteen months I have been editing a biography of Kevin Andrews, author of “The Flight of Ikaros: Travels in Greece during a civil war”, an American who supported the left-wingers in Athens during The Colonels and who took Greek citizenship thereafter.

I hold a master copy of the MS and the author responds to my editing (as well as providing his own amendments, additions and deletions) as email attachments of the transformed chapters fly between us. Just recently, long after the radical initial assaults on the MS were over, I discovered the perfect computer method for handling this.

Initially I saved the author’s latest chapters to a folder. To transfer his stuff I opened this folder and that containing the master copy and went cross-eyed moving from one chapter to the next incorporating his changes (helpfully marked in red). Since there are forty chapters much time was spent switching from one folder to the other.

Now I amend the file titles of his chapters with an X and save them direct to the master copy folder. The contents now look something like this:

Chapter One (Master file)
Chapter OneX
Chapter Two (Master file)
Chapter TwoX

I am thus always working in the same folder saving time and irritation and helping to cement the correct author/editor relationship. Another wheel rediscovered.

The techno-god of small things

Time for another legend about Monsieur Chauvel, our plumber in France and one of my techno-heros.

After he repaired the 50-year-old kitchen geyzer (see July 8) we had hot water for the hand-basin and shower in the bathroom. But neither my wife nor I are shower people. In my case I’ve never managed to adapt a shower to my main reason for practising ablution (ie, spending an hour reading).

And so M. Chauvel installed a modern electric water heater (huge and powerful) and a bath, and reversed the hot water flow in the pipe linking bathroom and kitchen. As a result the geyzer became redundant and was removed. All this was done quite painlessly while we were back home in Kingston. On our next holiday he paid us a quick visit to explain the workings of his new installation.

Finally he pointed to the spot where the geyzer had been. Its removal had required him to detach half a tile from the wall. But replacing it would be simple and he told me how. After this instruction he looked at my face and assessed the likelihood of my rousing myself and performing this simple task.

Yes, you’ve guessed it. When we next returned to the house the tile had been neatly replaced.