Something? Nothing? Now amended

Didn't get this right first time. Changes in red.

Yesterday, on the 9.10 am from Newport to London Paddington a woman had plugged in her laptop and was word-processing furiously. Fiftyish, streaky brass-brown hair tied back carelessly, sharp nose, haggard facial tones, dubious complexion. Garish slit-like glasses (imagine an Alice band that had slipped forward). Gold rings on third finger of both hands. The rest I never noticed or I’ve forgotten.

What caught my eye was her intensity. Her technique was speedy and her lips moved as she spelled out words on the keyboard. Occasionally she referred to a thick, official-looking typed document and then resumed. Too many people merely languish while travelling on trains. She wasn’t languishing and I admired that.

Every time I looked up from my Kindle she was still at it, her lips continuing to shape the words precisely, a gift to even the most modest of lip readers. Though I suspect what she was writing wasn’t as interesting as her sense of application.

As we neared Paddington I was distracted and when I next looked the laptop had been stowed away, glasses off, her hair had been de-secured so that it now bracketed her face, she may even have done a light pass of lipstick. Fine-drawn (one of my mother’s adjectival phrases) and relaxed, she was truly beautiful. Adult beautiful. We went our ways.

PS 1: When typing she was in profile; afterwards, full face. This may explain the transformation.

PS 2: Why was her purposeful state so much more memorable than the revelation she was beautiful?

PS 3: How did I manage to forget those glasses?

Friendship and good written stuff

What constitutes a friend? Shared humour, conversation, trust, self-evident generosity. Plus duration: five years minimum, say. I've worked out I may have two and a half friends, the half having recently swum back after thirty years. Another I have not included is distant with status uncertain.

None a woman but not by choice; better writers than me have struggled with that one. I look at my links list and realise its potential given my tiny “real” world. WW is three years old, so two years to go. But then comes the key issue of reciprocity.

HATED The Graduate. Was it serious or was it purely comic? Except for the music which came with worthwhile lyrics. From the same source here’s the middle eight (actually the middle six) from Night Game:

Then the night turned cold
Colder than the moon
The stars were white as bones
The stadium was old
Older than the screams
Older than the teams

But you’ve got to love baseball.


MORE good lyrics:

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.

Alas the penultimate line is terrible and I’ve missed it out. The photo is in and around Scafell Pike, England’s highest mountain (3210 feet).

A book now part of my DNA

Three combined novels that gripped and moved me in my youth: The Complete History of the Bastable Family, by E. Nesbit. I haven’t opened the book for a while yet, as I do, the gripping and moving starts all over again.

We are the Bastables. There are six of us besides father. Our mother is dead, and if you think we don’t care because I don’t tell you much about her, you only show that you do not understand people at all.

Perhaps “British” should be inserted before “people” for these are very British stories. As in the better known Railway Children, the children are left to their own devices.

They decide to restore the family fortunes and fail. Cast down by their father’s (brief) disapproval (Your lot is indeed a dark and terrible one when your father is ashamed of you. And we all knew this, so that we felt in our chests just as if we had swallowed a hard-boiled egg whole. ) they form the New Society For Being Good In, a project later disparaged. Reforming their horrible cousin Archibald turns out equivocally.

These are moral stories but, at its best, the morality arrives by accident. Oswald, the eldest child, is the narrator and his style (to me the most brilliant element) is that of a teenager conscious that the burdens of adulthood are just round the corner. The books were written at the turn of the century, I read them in the late nineteen-forties. It was if the action was occurring in the street outside. The concerns were my concerns, the opinions my opinions.

My recommendation is you don’t read them. I can’t bear the thought we might disagree about their merit. Please click pic; it deserves it.

Seduction for the elderly

Some music arrives by the back door.

When I was still in my editorial pomp a Swiss businessman, who had better remain anonymous, spent a good deal of his company cash currying my favour. Got me tickets to Glyndebourne, accompanied me to the Paris Opera for Berg’s Wozzeck, dined me at Le Grand Véfour (then a Paris three-star), chatted about his Ferrari and about his vintage violin on which he played Bach. We got on. I sent him LPs by Solomon, piano master of Beethoven’s slow movements, and he urged me to try Notturno by the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck.

Schoeck who died in 1957 is modern-ish but not oppressively so. Notturno, for string quartet and voice (baritone in my case), incorporates settings of four German poems. I bought the LP, played it once, didn’t take it in, let it languish. A decade later I transferred my LPs to CDs and thereby re-discovered Notturno. Gentle, reflective, predominantly minor-key, it’s a small masterpiece; it’s playing now and the German word traurig (sad) recurs. Perfect music for someone of my age and disposition.

I wrote thanking him for this late-flowering piece and he phoned me back. Meanwhile Notturno shuffles its way into my consciousness. Again, this is not a recommendation: too much would have to come together for that. Just a celebration of how things can happen and hopes of further Notturno moments for all of us.

NOVEL Nineteen out of twenty chapters subjected to first-pass revision: result 6579 words (out of the original 119,154) have bit the dust. I feel cleaner for it.

Ahead in an over-crowded race

Know what you’re thinking. Lurid paperbacks proffered by that fearfully pretentious BB who likes to boast about Ulysses and Proust. Indeed. One point: these titles, mostly secondhand, were gathered lovingly throughout the world via Abe Books and all have been re-read. My discovery.

Ross Thomas, an American, died in 1995. Wikipedia refers to “his witty thrillers that expose the mechanisms of professional politics.” A narrow view but you get an idea from jobs he’s held: “public relations specialist, reporter, union spokesman, political strategist in the USA, Bonn and Nigeria.” He writes about power and its misuse, but not all the time. As to “witty” there are clues in some of the titles: The Fools In Town are on our Side, Twilight at Mac’s Place, and Ah, Treachery!

His men and women get on with the job, don’t complain, hide their intellect, feature in labyrinthine plots, hover on the brink of irony. They travel around and there’s always a sense of place.

As with his predecessor, Dashiell Hammett, Thomas’s dialogue says a lot in almost no words at all. Here’s Chinaman’s Chance:

“Was he evil?”
“Evil. That's not a word I use much.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t suppose he was. Or is.”
“What he did, he did because he thought he was right.”
Durant shook his head. “He didn’t just think it; he knew it.”
“But he wasn’t was he?”
“Well, he’s in jail,” Durant said.
“But that doesn’t mean we were right.”
“No,” Durant said, “it means we got away with it.”
“And that’s what counts.”
“Usually.”

There’s a reason I’m not recommending Thomas: if you tried him and didn’t like him, it might change our relationship.

Enjoying it isn't enough

Betrayal: I do it all the time.

I read books, watch movies, observe paintings, hear music and often I’m moved and impressed. What’s my next step? Not beholden to any Mystical Presence I feel I must – repeat must - honour human achievement since creating stuff is far harder than simply consuming it. Which means if I’m honest and care to do my bit I must broadcast my experiences. A duty for which writers, directors, actors, painters, composers and instrumentalists are entitled to demand my best efforts.

Alas, I tend to betray my heroes - mainly by omission. I say nothing. On rare occasions I do communicate what I know but fail again. Defective technique, defective passion. Very very rarely (ten times in a lifetime) I succeed. This can be exhilarating since I benefit too.

Music’s the hardest. It’s time-dependant and requires a language I only dimly understand. Many people share my dimness. So, is it worth the effort? Yes, it is. Music moves me more than anything else.

Yesterday I was writing as usual. A Haydn string quartet was playing, the one which includes the German national anthem melody in a spare, stately, slow form quite different from that when Sebastian Vettel wins a grand prix. It’s a simple tune and I was able to pick it out on my keyboard in the right key as the Borodin played it. This isn’t usually what music’s about but it was musical and pleased me. The best music seems to fit something in us which we already know, creating harmony between hearer and what is heard. A heavenly state marked by a gentle fizz. I fizzed and went on writing.

Probably another betrayal. But I have to try; in the end other people are what matter.

Better than a telegram from the Queen

A true story based on affection, the passage of time, a change of heart. And no confusing dog.

I first met Mrs BB (then Miss T) in 1959 while working in London for a cycling magazine. Given our mutual enchantment she willingly accompanied me to Cardiff one Saturday afternoon where I reported the Olympic track cycling trials. Miss T said later cycle racing bored her and she was only entertained when one racer, high on the banked track, toppled over and dislodged others.

Soon after I left the cycling magazine and moved to a hi-fi magazine. Despite this the new Mrs BB continued, for two decades, to proclaim this view of cycle racing.

Time passed. We bought a house in France with a French telly. There we were both drawn into the Tour de France and remained converts thereafter. I shall not try to persuade those who imagine that the TdF is a mere race; it is easily as complicated as cricket and takes time to appreciate fully. What’s more it has the most gorgeous backdrop (ie, France) much of it shot from helicopters. After each transmission, just ended on ITV4 in Britain, we eagerly discussed tactics achieved or missed.

It is my birthday shortly. Changing her painting style completely Mrs BB has created this impressionistic acrylic of the team time trial stage of the TdF. “If he doesn’t want it, I’ll have it,” said Younger Daughter, another TdF convert. Fat chance. A long way from the 1959 Olympic trials Mrs BB and I embraced. “After all you did me a poem,” she said.

I envisage a shiny dark green frame but can’t wait for that.

NOVEL Now up to 108,059 words. Perhaps another 5000 to go.

Taking the scenic route

Writing the novel I am in the midst of describing the slow birth of a love affair but that can be just as demanding as being clear about the passage of time, or tapping out details of a room where the disposition of the chairs helps propel the plot. What is different is my involvement in the emotions and the need to break away from time to time and stop panting.

I mentioned acquiring an electronic keyboard. It sits inches away from my left elbow and the voice is set to Grand Piano. But what tune when Jana’s dilemmas become too piercing? Here’s a song where simple words and heartbreakingly simple notes combine.

Did you not see my lady (A tight cluster of notes, one for each syllable)
Go down the garden singing (That lovely lower note on “Go”)

And in no time at all words and music create the image of a woman whose grace is implicit (“my lady”) singing, not for an audience, but for the sheer pleasure of the thing. It is surely her very unselfconsciousness that sets the alleys ringing.

Another verse followed by true genius, the middle eight which starts.

Though I am nothing to her,
Though she would rarely look at me,

The musical pattern is similar but moves up the scale. A transition into what sounds almost like a minor key captures the restrained yearning of the admirer. How clumsy I’m making it sound. How much better that you pick it out on your own (or blow it on a tin whistle) reciting the words in your mind. The tune, I have just discovered, is by Handel. I should have known that years ago.

Hard stuff precedes indulgence

It’s that time of year. Last weekend the Hay Festival (sponsored now by The Telegraph instead of The Guardian – what an intellectual, moral and political crisis that wrought), this coming weekend the start of the St Jean de la Blaquière quinzaine.

Hay provided an agonising dilemma for those who espouse literature at the expense of science. In “Darwin and Milton – Two Views of Creation” by the British Nobel-Prize-winning biologist, Paul Nurse compared “the vision of two of the Greatest Britons of all time.” Could anyone who honours me by reading Works Well have turned away from that?

Our fifth consecutive holiday at SJDLB will focus, as usual, on grandson Zach (seen here unseasonably opening a Christmas present). His first year at primary school ends and his reading is now good enough to absorb The Guardian sports section and to dispute critical opinion on various soccer teams. In my own mind I am preparing him for our visit to the bakery (which he calls The Windmill Shop). There he will discard simple felicitation and utter: Bonjour M. le Boulanger. Je suis en vacances.

SJDLB comes at a price: I am separated from you all. Such sweet sorrow.


IDEAL FOR BURGLARS Last week the house was surveyed for the PV cell installation on the roof. Kevin the surveyor brought his own collapsible ladder – compact enough to go on the back seat of a car, extendable to reach the roof comfortably. Made of aluminium but reassuringly heavy. A compass app on his smart phone told him which way my roof faces.

Marriage and its defective glue

Mrs BB has gone to Hereford and I’ve hung out the laundry. Like washing up and packing bags at the supermarket check-out this task defines our marriage.

I’m prepared to work the clothes-line but do not care to share the task. During my professional career I needed to understand the logistics of many industrial processes and the clothes-line has much in common with them. Efficiency depends on the hanging peg bag and how it is moved. Mrs BB and I have conflicting views and we’ll leave it at that.

Washing up is more important. Mrs BB cooks and I wash up. This is obviously not a fair division of labour and to compensate I have subjected washing up to extreme analysis and am confident I have mastered this dynamic process. My sequencing techniques, insistence on a brush, pre-rinsing, hot-water management, methods of racking and parallel handling of pans combine to give the ultimate in speed and hygiene. On the rare occasions when Mrs BB washes up it is clear her mind’s on other things. I have no complaints. When she cooks she concentrates and that’s what matters.

At the supermarket check-out I have learned to take a passive role. I believe some form of logic operates but it is beyond me. I am frequently upbraided for crimes I know not what. Like Boxer in Animal Farm I lift the bags into the car silently.

B-FLAT ECHOES Buy something on line and you’re spammed for the rest of your natural. The resultant emails are often odd and poignant reminders of how irregular our lives are. Take Dawson Music, for instance. Once I downloaded the sheet music for The Lady is a Tramp from them. Now they’re having a sale. Should I take a look?

The agony (of being moved by Wagner)

I loathe fairy tales, myths, out-of-mind experiences, the supernatural, voodoo, animalisations, horror movies, most science fiction, miracles, received religions, undefined enthusiasm, and a sense of déja vu.

Yet I’ve dabbled in Wagner. Why? Because the music’s good.

Last night, watching a live HD presentation of Die Walküre by the New York Met I rose up a notch. I was moved.

I need to tell you part of the plot. This is a big turn-off even for people who love things in my black list above. I've kept it brief.

For irresistible political and domestic reasons Wotan, king of the gods, agrees – very, very reluctantly – to arrange that his bastard son dies in a forthcoming battle. His well-beloved daughter Brȕnnhilde is despatched to ensure this. For humanitarian reasons she tries to save the son, Wotan is forced to intervene and his son dies. For disobeying a god’s wishes Brȕnnhilde is punished, horribly.

During the last act Brȕnnhilde pleads against her punishment and has a lot going for her. She has always loved and obeyed her father to the point where she gained “favoured” status. She disobeyed him on this occasion because she knows he loves the bastard son. She is telling the truth and Wotan knows it. He is in agony. But the punishment stands.

The singers – Bryn Terfel and Deborah Voigt – are world-class and the music works relentlessly backwards and forwards to re-create the emotions and regrets both are experiencing. This is believable stuff aimed at proving that power is never infinite, that even gods – never mind humans – are never free. I was moved last night and I am moved again, writing this. I can say no more.

The year of the spoon

These secondhand serving spoons were a gift from my father about fifty years ago. They are silver and when struck ring out with a distinctive light “ping”. Two are plain, one carries a set of initials, the fourth a date – 1818. Despite their age and potential value we have used them for what they were intended and they travelled to the USA and back when we lived there. I Googled the dated spoon’s birth year:

Born: Karl Marx, William George Fargo (co-founder Wells Fargo), Amelia Jenks Bloomer (feminist reformer; must have been tough with that name), Emily Brontë (in Thornton, three miles away from, and 117 years before, I was born), Lucy Stone (suffragist and feminist), Richard J. Gatling (inventor of eponymous gun), James Prescott Joule (experimental physicist; gave name to unit of energy)
Published: Frankenstein, Endymion, Northanger Abbey (posth.).
Written: Hammerklavier sonata.
Events: Thomas Bowdler becomes infamous, George IV orders boots for left and right feet, Bernardo O'Higgins establishes Chile's independence from Spain, Australia Day celebrated.

MACHINE BETTER Everyone complains about dealing with machines, recorded voices, etc, rather than humans. But there are advantages. Throughout Hereford’s film festival we needed change for parking meters. Even counter operators at the Tesco filling station frowned when I repeatedly bought a paper with a £20 note. But the automated check-outs at the supermarket proper didn’t grumble.

THE LOVE PROBLEM 47,971 words (ie, almost half way). Jana’s student, Didi (a woman), goes solo. Her other student, Matthieu (a fella), struggles.

Not always what the marketing man ordered

What’s the best brand name ever? Brasso must come close: short, unambiguous, even a bit of wit. The worst? How about Francis Barnett? A motorbike undermined by the manufacturer’s weak-kneed birth certificate.

Brand names encircle our lives, especially our youth. Reckitt & Colman went global as Reckitt Benckiser but for me R&C is a wooden peg sticking out of a fabric bag of dolly blue - whatever that was. Persil is middle-class detergent but who would trust cheaply ostentatious Daz? Dreft - for clothes so delicate you’d prefer not to wear them - somehow matches the translucent white flakes.

Shell, BP, Elf and Texaco snap out their oily names but Fina falls flat. As revenge I’m inclined to say Finner. Omega’s an OK wristwatch but Rolex is a supermarket trolley; Longines (my watch) speaks French chic and beats them both.

Cox’s Orange Pippin and Bramley Seedling have ancestry which Gala obviously lacks. Who would eat spreadable butter from Lurpak which sounds like an eructation? - the BBs do, but quietly. Qantas was too easily transmogrified into Quaint-arse (by Alf Garnett) to be taken seriously.

Lagonda became part of Aston Martin and serve ‘em right; sounds like a taxi you’d hail in Venice. Noilly Prat overcame English prejudice to help create the dry martini but it was a near thing.

I’ll never drink Byrrh, there was no need to spell it like that. I get the feeling a Stanley knife will cut. Same with Gillette but Wilkinson’s a subfusc hoo-ha. Never let a committee dream up a toothpaste name, otherwise you’ll get Sensodyne.

Where did this avalanche come from? From a question in a 1066 And All That exam paper: Why do you think of John of Gaunt as an emaciated grandee?

Oh oh, it's second childhood time again

Sensual or sensuous? My dictionary distinguishes. The more common sensual carries “overtones of sexual desire and pleasure”, the more neutral sensuous covers an appeal “to the senses but without the feeling of self-indulgence and sexiness”. My personal mnemonic will now be a Guardian reader and a Daily Mail reader.

So let’s have examples. Sensual taste (boiled bacon with parsley sauce), smell (Wright’s Coal Tar Soap), sound (Kirsty Young saying anything), touch (my fake silk – but uncrushable – shirt from Exact Tailoring Services), sight (Port Underwood, NZ South Island, at dawn).

We’re missing one sense: movement, not seen but experienced. Alas it’s not available to all, regarded as too terrifying, too vulgar, too laddish. But motorbike riding is right up there. For those who have only driven cars there is a comparative metaphor which, I fear, hinges on birth control methods.

Steering a car is banal: turn the wheel left and you go left, fumble that stick thing and the gearbox responds – in its own good time. With a bike, steering is closer to thinking: in both meanings of the word (ie, leaning and tending to) you incline yourself towards passage through a corner. The foot flicks, the gears change. More speed? You’ve got it. You’re part of cold, real nature. There’s risk and perhaps foolishness; but have you never willingly made a fool of yourself? Definitely sensual.

PUZZLE On November 5 I mentioned a TV programme in which a beautiful woman analysed self-portraits by famous artists. The woman’s beauty proved integral to the programme and I explored this, clumsily, badly. The title of the post was obscure and there were five comments, one of them mine. Stats reveal this has since attracted 43 pageviews. What’s going on out there?

A debt acknowledged

Recently I’ve discussed American English and some American respondents adopted an apologetic tone regarding their native tongue. The stuff below proves that any apology is misplaced. Exceeds 300 words.

Mark Twain's Rules for Funeral Etiquette. At the moving passages, be moved -- but only according to the degree of your intimacy with the parties giving the entertainment, or with the party in whose honor the entertainment is given. Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.

Do not bring your dog.

William Goldman, screen writer. As to his size: he's like the Pentagon; no matter how big you think it's going to be it's always bigger. André's publicity has him at seven feet five inches and 550 pounds (This is not a fat man remember.)... It's in his presence. André is very still... (perhaps) because he's never sure what reaction people will have to him. I've seen children meet him and go mad with glee and start to climb on him. Other children scream in fear and run away... His hands may well be the most remarkable thing about him... Shaking hands with André is like dipping your hand into a well.

Richard P Feynman, physicist, on letter censorship at Los Alamos.
I said: I have a game. I challenge (my friends, relations) to send me a code that I can’t decipher, see. So, they’re making up codes at the other end, and they’re sending them in, and they’re not going to tell me what the key is.
Los Alamos letter censor: Well you’re going to have to tell them please to send the key in with the code.
I said: But I don’t want to see the key!
Censor: Well, all right, we’ll take the code out.

The Great Gatsby. There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby’s enormous house, so I looked at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour. A brewer had built it early in the “period” craze, a decade before, and there was a story that he’d agreed to pay five years’ taxes on all the neighbouring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family – he went into an immediate decline.

Ross Thomas, underrated thriller writer. It could have been called a trial, I suppose… Our Star Chamber judge carefully arranged six sharpened pencils on the desk beside a fresh yellow legal pad. Next he produced his pipe, tobacco pouch and match box, and placed them within easy reach. He then adopted an expression which he may have thought was his best horse-sense look. He made his face as long as possible, showed both of us his teeth in an impartial manner, and nodded several times as if he were adjusting to some invisible halter. I almost expected him to neigh us to order.

Doing my Helmut Schmidt bit

Frosty. I wear my Rhine barge cap to Tesco and become A Man In A Hat - a slightly different person. Always aware of the headgear but comforted by a conviction that I at least know it doesn’t look stupid.

We buy flowers which Mrs BB says need protection. Recently a potted basil plant suffered frost-bite when exposed to very cold weather on the ten-minute walk back home.

Neighbour Andy has unearthed his mother’s Common Prayer (dated 1922) and draws my attention to material he assumes has subsequently been altered or expunged:
● Almighty Lord God who for the sin of man didst once drown all the world, except eight persons, and afterwards of thy great mercy didst promise never to destroy it so again…
● Oh Almighty God, who in thy wrath didst send a plague upon thine own people in the wilderness for their obstinate rebellion against Moses and Aaron…
● (Headline) Articles agreed upon by the archbishops and bishops of both provinces and the whole clergy… for the avoiding of diversities of opinion and for the establishing of consent touching true religion. London 1562
● (One such article) The Riches and Goods of Christians are not common, touching the right, title and possession of the same, as certain Anabaptists boast…

NEW NOVEL 4902 words, January 21 2011. Yana, an American living in France, is speaking French to Josette. Since the book is in English the dialogue appears as English. Should Yana’s “translated” English differ from the American English she uses when speaking to an English speaker? Sounds silly, perhaps, but there are advantages in having these two modes.

A cold-weather pot-pourri

PROFESSIONALISM Members of Mrs BB’s painting group are concerned about her eye op. One is visiting us this morning “elevenish” and as I left to pick up the paper Mrs BB had started making little cakes. Such casualness

CLICHÉ STUFF The forecasts were gloomy last night: hard frost. It was mild and sunny when I set off for the paper, cold and windy when I returned. The walk lasts six minutes.

BABBLE Deafness. The problem is distinguishing what people are saying against a noisy background. The supermarket check-out for instance.

VALUE Currently the best quality bargains in French wine (ie, in the £8 - £12 bracket) are Coteaux du Languedoc AC. Of those look for villages with their own AC, especially Montpeyroux. Also Faugères and Picpoul de Pinet.

HORRIBLE The first motorbike I owned was a 125 cc BSA Bantam (see pic). Wretched. Note lack of rear suspension and pillion seat - but then it further lacked the power to tote two people.

DQ I’m 48 pages from finishing the 760-page Don Quixote. Would I recommend it? Yes, and for the same reasons I would recommend that every male youth in the UK does military National Service. Now I’ve done mine.

BROS K Plutarch suggested I read The Brothers Karamazov so I’ve bought a second-hand copy via ABE Books. It’s 985 pages. In the past I’ve made three attempts, the most recent failing at page 150.

LONG WAIT I am replacing my car with another of the same make and model. The waiting list was initially three months. Now it’s twenty-two weeks. Various reasons for the delay are offered: rarity of DSG automatic gearboxes and (the much more likely) rarity of RHD.

Mrs BB goes (briefly) back in time

The surgery for a trabeculectomy lasts a mere eighteen minutes; the bad news is it involves the eyeball. Like most who’ve worked in hospitals, Mrs BB, an SRN, is an unwilling patient. I drop her at the hospital and we bid our goodbyes with no visible show of emotion, typical of Brits and appalling to most Americans. Four hours later, back in the car, she insists vallium isn’t worth a damn.

Denied books for twenty-four hours, she regards the blank telly and asks, “What do people who don’t read do all day?” Aloud I offer The Wine Society fine wines list and we agree on a Sancerre (les Monts Condamnés,) for Christmas. Rid of stress she dozes profoundly. Sleeps well that night.

MEANWHILE… Later, on BBC4, we watch an Oxford don exploring Greek myths. His plumminess, which renders Rome as Rame, is old-fashioned since such programmes now find wider audiences via presenters with regional accents. He irritates me further by patronising workers sorting mounds of pottery shards.

At first he’s dull and abstract. Then, as he compares Greeks and Hittites (surely the least amenable to Christ’s teaching) things hot up. I didn’t know Kronos was Zeus’s father. And I certainly didn’t know Kronos interposed himself between the copulating bodies of his father (name forgotten) and his mother, Earth, biting off his father’s “private parts”. The sequel is too extreme even for the liberalism Works Well practises.

The don returns to this theme of castration, pronouncing the word with relish and appearing, simultaneously, to grin. We are, of course, beyond the 9 pm watershed which defines adulthood, but I imagine a review in The Daily Mail. Mrs BB shares my opinion about the plumminess.

Not exactly cuisine minceur

New mincers are still available. Not as versatile or as speedy as food processors they are built to last a thousand years, invulnerable to power-cuts, easily washed, and digest everything served into their maw. Even bones. I operated my mother’s mincer and I can hear the sinister tearing noise even now. She was always at it, but why?

Why did immediate post-war cuisine demand so much grinding destruction? We ate a lot of what we called Shepherd’s Pie (I know, I know, we were misinformed. South-easterners call it Cottage Pie.) which required mince but surely butchers supplied that. I recollect much bread passing through the mincer’s alimentary canal but did we consume bread-crumbs on an industrial scale?

She may have mashed potatoes this way, I can’t be sure. And I have an even dimmer memory of bread and meat being ground simultaneously, perhaps for rissoles or an unsatisfactory – and unwisely extended – meat patty. Speculation on this has lead to a fierce argument with Mrs BB and I am now temporarily denied her input on the matter.

Soup? My mother’s soups were not her forte and the constituents were readily, and lumpily, identifiable. Certainly unminced.

QUIETLY FLOWS THE DON Part Two of Don Quixote is less anecdotal and I have reached page 467 (out of 760). Could it be your thing? Here’s a sample:

“Whoever undertakes a long journey… (seeks) an agreeable companion. How cautious should he then be, who is to take a journey for life, whose fellow traveller must not part with him but at the grave; his companion at bed and board and sharer of all the pleasures and fatigues of his journey, as the wife must be to the husband.”

The poop was beaten gold, etc, etc

Stay with me, please. It’s not merely about TV you’ll never see.

The programme concerned self-portraiture. Given 90 minutes, writer/commentator Laura Cumming “stepped back” from Dürer’s unflinching gaze, followed Rembrant’s monumental series on “what it was like from inside to grow old”, revealed David in his jail to be “confused”, sympathised with Courbet as an early Master of the Universe, explained why Mondrian’s self-portrait couldn’t be “a Mondrian”.

Van Gogh doesn’t incorporate madness into his self-portraits, rather a growing technical logic. We laugh too at Mark Wallinger’s sculpture of a capital I in Times New Roman.

Here’s where it gets hard. Laura Cumming (art critic of The Observer) is beautiful. It shouldn’t matter but it did. Her loveliness is throwaway with blonde hair, carelessly clipped up, gradually releasing strands all over. She dresses casually but Mrs BB, who agrees about her beauty, says her clothes are expensive. Whatever - she flits down the Montmartre steps and it’s heart-breaking.

But this is not old BB “dying of bitches”. The sculptor Messerschmitt went round the bend and created heads in which he pulled astoundingly ugly faces. Cumming reaches out, draws her face near and the sculpted head becomes magically beautiful in itself. And self-evidently a masterpiece. Aping Warhol she dons sunglasses, slips into a photobooth, imitates the sequence Warhol took including one “where he appears to be hanged” and I see what Warhol is on about.

Without her looks Cumming’s enthusiasm and easy knowledge would have made a memorable programme. With her looks it was a killer. Am I simply a seduced older man? Disagreements about clothing aside, Mrs BB says she too was impressed.