Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

Paying autoroute tolls in France is a pain. Not because of the amounts, for these roads deliver good value; rather the interface ergonomics. The guichet is on the wrong side of the car (Hey, I know I’m foreign but I’m keeping France’s economy afloat), the ticket carries no way of predicting what’s to be paid, and I’m always a’feared younger daughter will drop the change.

There’s a much better system for the Severn Bridge and no doubt elsewhere in Britain. You’re told well in advance what you have to pay and when you arrive you toss the sum into a plastic hopper. It works well! And there’s this extra anthropomorphic pleasure, imagining this huge conceptual (Can’t stop using that adjective.) mouth swallowing and then digesting the coins.

An enlightened Highways Agency should decorate the hopper with painted teeth and a moustache

THE CURSE STRIKES 09.20 today. Sorting through the contents of the underpants drawer I pull out a white pair carrying a scene from a Loony Tunes cartoon, a joky Christmas table present more than a decade ago. Mrs Bonden: “It’s time those were thrown away.” BB: the usual rejoinder; why discard anything that’s still doing a job?

09. 45, on the way to Tesco for The Observer. That horrible feeling of insecurity as the elastic goes and the pants slide uselessly down my thighs. Underneath my trousers I hasten to add.

Question Can underpants be inveigled into failure?

Til a' the seas gang dry, my love

When L.P. Hartley wrote, “The past is another country. They do things differently there.” he cleverly avoided suggesting whether the things done were better or worse. An admirable aide mémoire for those of us well stricken in years since it hints we should be careful about recalling Golden Eras. Often, the Golden Era is now.

This jazzy device is our kitchen scale and I had intended it to be the basis for a quite different post. But the word scale took me back in time, reminding me of earlier versions of such weighing systems and the effect they had on the general populace.

No one under the age of fifty can possibly imagine how long it took to buy necessities in, say, 1951 . You didn’t serve yourself, you stood in a queue and listened to inordinate chat as white-aproned men behind the counter cut lumps of cheese, poured out bags of sugar and dug into barrels of dried peas then carefully weighed out the amounts. Weighed – that is – by putting the produce in one pan and weights in the other.

Groceries were beautifully tricked out with wooden drawers, hanging reels of string and a beguiling combination of smells. An environment destined straight for the heritage museum. And thank goodness. Using a grocery gave me plenty of time to reflect that the adult capacity for conversation was infinite. Those scales which helped drag out the process now grace the window-bottoms (West Riding phrase) of houses in south-east England. The Golden Age of Weighing? Yes, if you like weighing. Otherwise there’s always our streamlined little number.

Wanna look stupid? No need for a carrot nose

On telly young men in North Face anoraks screech about Britain’s snowfall using rhetoric and sometimes the vocabulary employed in last week’s financial crisis. Contrapuntally, other young men, much more chic, are saying how much better Moscow and Calgary are at coping with their snow. A pointless match null weather story since no local authority south of Inverness is prepared to invest in a fleet of rarely used bulldozers or a Ben Nevis of salt. Or is it grit?

Temperate Dorking, discommoded for all of forty-eight hours, must bite on the bullet and suffer. In Pittsburgh, where I dwelt for a year or two, things were different. The snow was thicker and the Democrat Machine knew what to do about that. What it couldn’t compensate for were the street gradients in the southern suburbs. Steep? Wow!

Locals carried sacks of cement in the already overhanging trunks (ie, boots) of their Chevvy Impalas. Thus when the car’s back end slid sideways in the slush the pendulum effect became uncontrollable. Me? I bought studded rear tyres for my Volvo 122S and smugly sailed up all those forbidding ski-slopes. So smug that I drove out that evening deliberately searching for the most vertiginous thoroughfares.

America knows how to punish smugness. What I hadn’t realised was that those rear wheels would play virtually no role at all when I started descending and needed to brake. The front wheels locked and the Volvo became a Flexible Flyer. Sweatily I guided the car to the roadside and allowed the kerb, graunching against the tyres, to bring things to a halt. At that point I would have been available for a screeching interview about snowy roads.

You can't argue with an orthodontist

Dentists accept being questioned because they can suppress the unanswerable. I asked mine how many Brits-per-year died in the dentist’s chair given that many sit there bathed in fear. She said something diplomatic but forestalled a follow-up question by filling my mouth with her fingers, the scritchy thing, the sucky tube and a pint of saliva.

As she pursued her scratching it occurred to me my teeth were taking a lot of punishment. But they are designed for it. The enamel is rated 5 on the Mohs hardness scale while iron is rated 4 to 5.

Dental surgeries are technology treasure troves. Take the chair; it's complex, so what does it cost? Here’s a funny thing. The Denttek BT ML 4800 DE with its “three powerful motors” has two prices €3594 and €4277. The first for the trade, the second for consumers! Aimed at true enthusiasts who like to rehearse their visits to the dentist.

But the chair seems a bargain compared with “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Dental Burs, Disks, Abrasive Points, Diamond Points, Wheels, and Other Tools for Use with Dental Hand Pieces in Japan.” A paperback, priced to go at £326.70, it reminds us that dental care costs a fortune in Britain. I asked my dentist why she didn’t sell advertising space on the light which looms over the prone patient. This produced a snigger and the brief removal of the sucky tube. Imminent drowning puts an end to investigative journalism.

It's a block; it's a book

Here are some items I appreciate: growing things (galanthus nivalis, say, given the season), paintings (the cliff-top church in Turner’s “Folkestone from the sea” is where we got married), combinations of poetry and music (Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden, Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt…), great prose (“… bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air…”) and slightly obscure wine regions (the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon). Plus this.

This is an engine block. It contains the moving bits like pistons and valves. It is cast from molten metal and many external surfaces carry the rough imprint of the mould because there is no need to polish them. Other surfaces, which have precise dimensional relationships, are machined until this is the case.

Some areas requiring this work are circular holes. Yet circles cannot be precise since they depend on a calculation involving π (the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter) and π is not an exact value. So how come the holes end up the right size? The answer has to do with tolerances, a quality shared with the translation into English of the first sentence of Proust’s A la recherche…

My blog is linked to that of Relucent Reader whose father was a precision machinist. This seemed an admirable activity until RR pointed out his dad found the work stressful. And why not? Working to tiny fractions of an inch (and it would have been inches, then) is more demanding, and carries more responsibility, than the way I earned my living and which I fondly imagined to be an adrenalin job.

The block reminds me of these things.

Anyone know this weirdo?

Eighty-five quid spent on five series of The Wire was a wonderful investment. Great three-dimensional scripts, if not for the faint-hearted. Plus a revelation that computers can be used by non-experts for Identikit work.

But how good are we at describing – even remembering – faces? Right now I’m trying to remember my own. As a conceit I say it’s gaunt but that’s vanity. Lengthy, cylindrical and lugubrious are better.

The ears were taped flat to my head when I was a baby. This has streamlined me for swimming but the ears don’t work well as sound collectors. Bags under-identify those hanging gardens beneath my hazel (Hard to live with that adjective at school) eyes. A long forgotten author, John Lodwick, used “cement sacks” in painting a debauched character’s face and that phrase does the job.

My hair went grey in my twenties but it stayed put. It’s now white and is deliberately left uncombed to cultivate the hand-on-the-tiller/spume-in-the-face look. It is merely untidy. The mouth? Here objectivity begins to fail. The lower lip has links with that of Oscar Wilde. It could be described – by someone without my interests at heart – as that of a sensualist. From the West Riding?

Let’s finish upbeat. The nose is a success. Straight, incisive, right off the face of John Neville. Women have praised it, though possibly in default of anything else. Have you got all that? Combine the details, create a sketch and I’ll publish the one that comes closest.
Note. No help from the inset. I chose it because of its inappropriate name – Dudeman.

Worth the warmth. Or perhaps not

Been baby-sitting our daughter’s Cairn. A difficult time.

The dog fidgets. Is it thirsty? Does it want to go outside pour faire le pi-pi? Or does it merely want to dump its sense of unease on us?

Going walkies requires a plastic supermarket bag leading to the unspeakable detection of warmth as one fulfills one’s obligations as a good citizen. But this is a story with a happy ending.

It became obvious that the dog (It’s a bitch actually but that word carries semantic risks) needed to be corralled briefly in the kitchen where the tiled floor would provide a more hygienic alternative to the carpets elsewhere. But the kitchen door hasn’t closed properly for ten years and the dog could bounce it open. So I took the door off its hinges, placed it on trestles in the garage, sawed 4 mm off the bottom edge and re-installed it. And now neither of us can get over the sheer pleasure of simply shutting that door.

WRITING: CRAFT NOT ART
Eclogue 1. Easy writing, hard reading (Not mine, alas)
Example: Emotion should be implied, never described. As in Hemingway’s wonderful short story: “Baby shoes for sale. Never used.”
Note 1. All my novels remain unpublished.
Note 2. I sort of have Lucy’s (implicit) permission to stop apologising for the misuse of “eclogue”.

Blériot was even worse, I suppose

It took three holidays in New Zealand before we learned the best way of enduring the journey (ie, by over-nighting in a Kuala Lumpur hotel with a swimming pool). The other two were nightmares: squeezed into a Japanese Airlines quasi-coffin with a l½-hr stop in Tokyo, and a “wrong way” option via San Francisco which involved an interminable Auckland – Chicago return leg landing in a blizzard.

Even so these were improvements on my first flight – Heathrow to Singapore, February 1956 - travelling to RAF Seletar to practice my newly acquired radio-repairing skills.

The propellor plane (type forgotten) flew slowly at 9500 ft. That microlight altitude exposed us to eight hours of heavy turbulence over mainland Europe until we landed thankfully at Rome. Ninety minutes later, after a fried-egg breakfast, we left for Cyprus for another egg, deep-fried in oil and eaten at about 3 am. Again we were back in the plane within two hours to land at 120 deg F Bahrein. Guess what we had for breakfast.

Another eight-hour flight saw us in Karachi and an overnight stop. Landing next day in Delhi I dimly perceived what I took to be the Himalayas. A quick eggless meal and we were en route for Calcutta where there were four or five hours to kill, but in the late afternoon. In Bangkok I saw an air hostess wearing a cheongsam. Very shortly after arriving at Singapore I went down with an exhilarating attack of the runs. Jumbos do have their advantages.