Colours and smells from my hinterland

Washing-up liquid has to be green. Not blue nor – worst of all – orange. I confess I’m clay in the hands of the advertisers: green is whispering pine trees and not industrial chemicals. But there’s another, virtually primordial, influence. At age six, when these things mattered, green became my favourite colour. A lightly taken decision I have never escaped.

Twenty years ago we bought cocoanut-scented soap in Haut. Lompnes, a French mountain town, a cité sanitaire peopled entirely by invalids. The delicate and subtle scent proved an aid to washing my face which I’m otherwise not disposed to do. The subtlety has never been duplicated. Today I used cocoanut soap from The Body Shop. Not the same.

Maclean toothpaste once had a tingly taste hinting at the stuff women use to remove nail varnish. Probably toxic. My preferred poison. Then Maclean entered the Bland Corral and teeth-cleaning became a burden. Sensodyne is the dentist’s recommendation. Blah!

Swarfega is flurorescent green, seductively slimy, has the sharp manly smell of a refinery’s backside and cleans engine oil from your hands. Unaffected by fashion but I don’t get my hands oily these days.

Pungent and earthy Vim was a grey powder which came in a cardboard tube. Add water and you could grind lacquered stains off aluminium pans. Perfect for my Gran who loved elbow-grease jobs. Mrs BB thinks Vim gave way to Ajax. This evokes a couplet from She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage modified by Elder Daughter:

It’s sad when you think of her wasted life,
For youth doesn’t mix with Ajax.

Cue for giggles.

Galsworthy could also have stood cutting

The occasional table, just visible, was made by my great grandfather. The baby chaffinch (extreme right) was touring significant British literary artefacts and paying homage to the Barrett Bonden portable typewriter, source of millions of words for publications as diverse as Keighley News and Cycling & Mopeds before being retired in favour of word processing.

Had the chaffinch flown upstairs at Ch. Bonden it might well have inspected my latest literary tool. On holiday I used my Kindle to switch between two works. The first was Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (Why was that man found worthy of a Nobel Prize?) the second was the MS of my own novel, Gorgon Times.

This was more than self-massage. Kindle allows potential changes to be underlined while reading the MS in a format resembling a published book. At home I used the 477 underlinings to modify the master MS on the PC. And rewrote five longer passages including a half chapter. Some 1500 words bit the dust. Tedious, non-creative work will ensue.

MATTER OF ETIQUETTE For months, perhaps years, Mrs BB has complained I often rise from the dining table, face besmeared with gravy, custard, strawberry juice or, sometimes, all three. It has to do with getting old and caring less and less about how I look. Since this impromptu maquillage is invisible to me I am undisturbed but I do resent hopping out to the kitchen to clean greasy hands after nibbling a chop bone. Recently I suggested we invest in a table-napkin container to sit adjacent to the S&P. Mrs BB instantly agreed. I am left reflecting on the length of time this decision has taken. And the fact that such containers may be middle-class naff.

At 30 deg C the mind starts to soften

SJdlB 3. Where it’s not just the grasshopper that becomes a burden but the strimmer. Next door started up yesterday after a prolonged bout of horseplay in our pool (we’ve been joined by granddaughter Bella and her boyfriend). This morning, as I hang out the washing, the other neighbour contributes a succession of roaring arias.

I can’t complain. These are not lawns that would be recognised as such in Epsom or Wilmslow. The grass is scrappy and parched, the ground pebbly and the contours random. No place for the stately Qualcast or even the mediaeval scythe.

As I proceed from pegging out the rewarding biggies (a pair of trousers, a bath towel) to the fiddly small stuff (socks, knickers, a bra) yesterday’s droner shouts his thanks for retrieving his wheelie bin and pushing it up the steep track to our two villas. An accidental gesture since I thought it was ours. He shrugs and a butterfly negotiates my washing line. Not a day for architecture – it rarely is here in oven-hot Languedoc. Culture is contained in the wafer confines of the Kindle: 29 titles including Ovid’s Metamorphosis and (more June-like) The Forsyte Saga. Plus much Arnold Bennett.

I return to the balcony to write this: down below the soccer ball is kicked desultorily as Younger Daughter floats backwards and forwards in an inflatable dinghy. We’re off to lunch soon, after which we’ll buy l’Equipe and read about Sunday’s thrilling Canadian GP.

Did you expect intellectuals straining at the leash?

The tenses may suggest otherwise but we're home now.

The above were tagged pêches plats at Clermont l’Hérault street market. Their flavour is unaffected by their flatness. Melons here hit your palate with the strength of chilis.

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?

Cost versus old age

I now have a financial incentive to live until I am eighty-three and a half. That’s the time it will take for the cost of the solar panel system I am contemplating to be amortised through my injections of surplus power back into the National Grid. The scheme has the government’s blessing though there are no grants. There is no salesmanship since the price is fixed (£6750) and it takes two hours to explain even though, in the end, it is relatively simple to understand. One misconception needs to be cleared up: the panels convert sunlight not heat into power

Switzerland and Germany have used such systems for decades. Inevitably the UK is behindhand in meeting its target of 15% of energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020 and is now looking for a take-up rate of 700,000 houses a year. Which seems mighty optimistic.

You ask the obvious question: suppose a rapidly ageing scribbler, on the verge of his seventy-sixth, snuffs it in the interim, goes into a home or is locked up for sedition? Well, the house is likely to sell for a price over the odds since the buyer inherits reduced electricity costs without the capital expenditure. More on this if there is a scintilla of interest.

OH JOY! In the last post I included a list of what Lucy elegantly described as my anathemata. To them I could have added caravans. My neighbour has one and he’s a techno-freak. Not for him the back-breaking task of manoeuvring the thing into his driveway. He uses a remotely controlled tug. This may be the only true pleasure to be derived from his box on wheels

Oh, and by the way, it rained

Britain is presently in a wedding frenzy as Folkestone was fifty-one years ago - but for different reasons. After disasters, arguments and supreme errors of aesthetic judgement there was only one way the BB marriage could go and that was up. Which, I'm happy to say, it has.

Mrs BB, then Miss T, had wanted a registry office wedding with, say, a dozen closest. "Don't be silly," her mother (an atheist in everything other than formal CofE observances) said, "people will think you're pregnant." Miss T said she would look forward to proving such doubters wrong. But, as you can see, a church it was.

LtoR: BB's youngest brother (dreaming of becoming a magnate, which he did), BB's mother (Pleased to be separated spatially from ex-husband; rode from Bradford to Folkestone on scooter; writing a short story in her head), BB's younger brother and best man (Born to pit himself against the wild - a cliché he'll enjoy), BB (In £21 Burton's suit, garnished with worst haircut ever), Mrs BB's father (who inserted himself into all the photos in this manner), Mrs BB (smiling despite having her dress stood on during the ceremony), BB's grannie (92 and much happier than she looks), dear, dear Diane (married a year before, five months' pregnant and a wonderful advertisement for pregnancy), BB's dad (who insisted BB couldn't wear a red tie and, when BB returned with a green tie, said grumpily "From Communism to Fenianism.")

The groom went on to learn a valuable lesson in public speaking that day (I cringe at the memory) and the groom’s father became a Folkestone myth in the matter of toping. A sequel will depend on how many comments this attracts.

Number crunching

The Love Problem reaches 64,500 words (ie, roughly two-thirds distance) and I announce the figure as an encouraging mantra. Here comes another clunker. TLP is being written in MSW 2010, full to the gunwales with new if unlikely features, including the fact that Total Editing Time spent on the MS amounts to 23,149 minutes or 385.82 hours or 16 solid days. So now you know.

Chapter 10 exceeds 10,000 words and covers a single love affair set in Tucson, Arizona. I am now back in SW France and re-adjusting is quite difficult. One interesting discovery is that a real-life affair of the heart is not recyclable; for reasons unfathomable it all has to be made up. Perhaps just as well. Jana fascinates me but I don’t adore her as I did Clare in Gorgon Times. However, the emotional volcano which justifies the title has yet to erupt and will occupy the remaining pages. Perhaps I shall erupt then too.

POTTERY The huge new en suite wash basin whose taps Zach cannot reach was publicised two or three months ago. When I use it I am not at my most observant so it came as a surprise to find it has a model name: Utopia. This discovery brings the whole rickety process of shaving to a halt, as I reflect on the how and the why. Underwhelming ambition, surely. Nowhere near my strangest name for a porcelain artefact: an ancient WC in the Lake District called The Pike.

QUITE HUMANE Confirmation of a book ordered on HHB’s recommendation arrives by email: Your Amazon order has dispatched… Transitive instead intransitive or the other way round, I’ve given up punditry for Lent. Unless the meaning refers to what goes on in abbatoirs.

Porn in the utility room

Rouchswalwe, whose sole fault on this earth was to adopt a blogonym that Anglophones found too hard to pronounce (Hence Zu schwer = Too difficult), not only launches regularly into poetry but writes prose that teeters on the brink. Eg:

Once we've touched a thing that feels distinctive… the skin tingles. And if that something is not a thing I can touch with my fingertips?... Sort of like hadaka no tsukiai in a Japanese Onsen [a hot spring bath], where no textiles come between water and skin, making it possible to conversationally commune with any fellow bathers in a state of uniquely textured tensionlessness.

Can’t match that but I have my mini-moments. One of my jobs Chez Bonden is to take laundry downstairs, stick it in the washer, prime the washer appropriately and push buttons. No sweat. But what was once an unexceptional chore has a delicious side-effect. Previously detergent was poured into a plastic container and chucked into the drum. Now it comes in fat squelchy sachets that feel almost organic. I've always regarded detergents as one of the most wearisome subjects known to man, triggering some of the most wearisome TV commercials. Seems that the manufacturer (Ariel) thought the same. But there are limits.

DEAR AGONY VET Occasional Speeder has taken her convalescence to Kenya and we are dog-sitting Missie, the Cairn that cost as much as two cases of Montrachet. I take her on a lead to pick up The Guardian and she sniffs and sprays every two metres of the – fortunately – short walk. But suppose I become impatient and tow her past one of these smelly places: what damage am I inflicting on the inner dog?

A golden era? More like leaden

Bloggers guilty of cynicism, practical jokes, inaccuracy, boasting, intellectual snobbery, phillistinism and ostentation should at least reveal their age, often the reason for these defects. As a regular practitioner of such vices I sought indemnity by including my age in my profile. Blogger has now removed this facility and I feel honour-bound to prove I am of a great age.

● My primary school was lit with gas mantles.
● Corporal punishment (by hand, ruler, cane and curtain-rod) was administered to pupils’ faces, the back of their necks, the front and back of their hands, their backsides and their thighs at my primary and grammar schools.
● Our milk was delivered daily, ladled from a large bucket into my mother’s jug.
● Waste metal was collected by a man with a horse-drawn cart.
● Once a man appeared in our street (eight houses on either side), took off his cap and, without amplification asked us to vote against Sunday cinemas.
● Dead cats abounded in the gutters of the main road.
● Cashiers at Lingards, a one-floor department store in Bradford, sat in a central cage on a raised platform. Cash spent at counters travelled to the cashiers on wire-supported containers.
● Barges used the Leeds-to-Liverpool canal commercially. We swam in it.
● Ever hungry, I could never come to terms with canned snoek.
● My preferred bought-in treat was chips with “a cake” – two discs of potato on either side of a thin slice of fish, deep-fried.
● My father bought large quantities of eggs, illegally, from farmers. My mother preserved them in a gloop based on isinglass.

I feel no nostalgia for any of this.

Don't turn light on, I'm working

I am most open to ideas at 5 am, lying abed, darkness outside, body comfortable. I once did six lines of a sonnet this way. Mrs BB bought me a mini-torch to aid scribbling notes rather than relying on memory. But a sonnet is containable; these days there is the more sprawling task of plotting a new novel. Here’s how it’s gone:

● Main character. Woman, who…? flies planes.
● Author ignorant about gayness (Don’t rule that out. Later, then.) hence a male accountant… culling employees from subsidiaries of a large company. Who may need to use a plane.
● Character theme. W. uses word “love” too freely, M. not at all. Thus American vs. British dichotomy. But turned on its head. At the end of (Successful? Unsuccessful?) affair Brit is guilty of destructive passion and American shows humanitarian restraint.
● Neutral territory, surely. France?
● Accountancy no longer appeals in France. Man helps monoglot Brits buy houses so probably was more successful once. Mid-forties.
● Woman an instructor rather than charter pilot. Age? Why in France? Gay episode in – great flying country – Arizona? Do gay episodes happen?
● Marital status/children of both. On back-burner. Same with parents
● Foreground plot. Iraq war. Local French discrimination against American. Chap’s burden? Back-burner.
● Idea from book I’m reading: woman is ugly. (It’s a plot device. I’m not in favour!)
TO BE DONE
Location (Probably south – better flying weather), acquaintances, families, contrary character traits, etc, etc.
STARTS WITH
Very long chapter (70 pp at least) flying house-buying customers. Removes much pre-history, frees up use of present tense. Flight adds changing interest.
BIG QUESTION
Dare I do chap in first-person? Would writing about woman suffer?

You don't know him but he's a giant

I sing of one of my heros, but only Sir Hugh will catch the echo. Walter Bonatti (still alive) is one of the hardest and certainly the greatest pioneer of long classic rock routes typically near Mont Blanc. Let’s talk Le Grand Capucin (left), let’s talk West Face of the Dru (right). Being Italian he favoured the direttissima way, straight up, ignoring comforting gulleys and easier ridges. Often these 3000 ft faces involved as many as five bivouacs, dangling from a piton with his feet over the abyss while Alpine night tried to turn his blood to stone. He writes vividly and includes important technical detail. Extracts of his greatest climbs, in a new translation, appear in The Mountains of My Life. My feeble tribute.

ODD AND CLEAR Our local library in the community centre is guarded by a new CCTV system. Unlike the fuzzy clips on TV news these are in colour and as sharp as a Hasselblad viewfinder. A centre manager offers a testimonial: “You see strange things around the centre at night.”

ADD NOT SUBTRACT Helped Mrs BB in an act of faith by planting bulbs that will emerge as flowers in the Spring. My sole reward is I’m always surprised when this happens. “Make holes 2 – 3 in. deep so that the bulbs are covered,” she says. This proves quite difficult but not for Mrs BB. She achieves the requisite depth by merely adding a layer of compost. The difference between a garden expert and a garden innocent.

ILLUSION Planted bulbs must be watered – even I know this. I switch the hose to Fierce Jet to fill the watering can. This may not do the job any quicker than the spray setting but it sounds as if it does. A drumming violence.

THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE (SEE BELOW)

Watched Mrs BB prepare Sticky Ginger Cake with Ginger Fudge Icing and was disturbed. I'm Virgo, needing control and tidiness, and recipes don't allow for me. This one required 87½ gm of black treacle (halved from the original) which Mrs BB table-spooned from the tin. Tolerances must have been ±50%. More precision with the butter since the paper packet had lines indicating popular fractions. Worrying work.

NOVEL Dr Plutarch has auscultated and biopsied the MS, done an MMR scan, cardiogram, endoscopy, X-rays and Rohrschach, measured blood pressure and sugar. Vital signs detected. Two months remedial.

FINE DESIGN I stuff the washing machine when I arise. The blue stuff is conditioner, function unknown. However, I approve of the bottle cap. Note the "moat" round the measure. It acts as a catchment and it's almost impossible to spill the liquid.

GOOD READ Finished Wolf Hall. An excellent primer on how to govern a country. Newspaper jokes suggest the book is an intellectual challenge. Not so, it's a good easy read. But the initial pages ominously list the characters. Stuck with the names of real people Hilary Mantel risks confusion since there are several Annes, Jos and Marys. Other than that, dive in (Most commenters to Works Well already have) and thank goodness that a free press, capable of scrutinising rulers, developed two or three hundred years later.

LINGUISTIC STIGMA (Finally it works) Recording my voice to forewarn those hearing it au nature brought unexpected reactions. I felt my accent had virtually disappeared (and good riddance). Others talked about cosy northern tones. I've recorded someone else's sonnet, rehabilitating the accent. Click here for UNCOSINESS

Hfd techno-trip

AUTOCRATIC LOO Yesterday we toured a four-star trio (Ledbury, Great Malvern, Pershore) from Simon Jenkins’ England’s Thousand Best Churches . Ledbury is one of seven churches in Herefordshire where the spire or tower is plonked on the ground rather than the roof. Easier to build of course but for no other known reason. However it was the men’s toilet outside the Pershore church that tickled my techno-fancy. A symphony in stainless steel it plays a recording once the door is locked: “Time spent in this toilet is limited. You will be warned when your time allocation is reached.” Despite my curiosity I discharged my affairs with alacrity and was out before the second message was made plain.

WEED WAR Weeds are emerging between the bricks laid on our heartlessly middle-class driveway. I squirted the green shoots with Weedol which promises “visible results within one hour”. That was two hours and a bit ago and I’m damned if my eyes are able to confirm this claim. But I’m not too disappointed. I ponder the possible effect on my hands had Weedol’s aggressiveness been proven.

IN FULL FLOW The feeble flow of hot water into our newly installed hand-basin was not ordained by law as one of the plumber’s fonctionnaires suggested. The main man inspected the dribble and acknowledged it had the power to irritate. After some discussion about “tails” (an essential feature of mixer taps it seems) a replacement was promised. Happily this turned out to be unnecessary. Removing the installed tap revealed that the hot-water tail was choked with rubble. I’m now less likely to cut myself while shaving.

The Bondens - altruism and self-interest

In a supreme (and horribly expensive) act of altruism the Bondens have, as announced, caused a shower to be installed in their main bathroom. This will meet complaints of shower-loving guests that a pre-existing shower is no use because it is located in the en suite bathroom and gaining access means passing through the Bonden bedroom. Most people prefer not to deal with the Bondens prior to 9 am.

Altruistic because the Bondens never take showers. Mrs BB bathes but follows a routine that is not widely explained. BB himself does not exactly bathe: he runs water, lies in it, reads for an hour, then gets out. This practice has always horrified residents of the North American continent but most are willing to compromise their high hygiene standards. Visits to chez Bonden may run the risk of bacterial infection but there are compensations, as the third part of the montage suggests.

The too-low wash-basin in the en suite has been replaced by a unit strangely resembling a Hammond organ. BB’s vertebral discs are no long at risk. However the nanny state feels it must protect its low IQ citizens from scalding their hands and hot water flow from the mixer tap is down to a dribble, by law it seems.

NOVEL Seven chapters (out of twenty-two) have now been subjected to preliminary editing and many words have taken off into the ether. The experience is salutary. Time after time verbosity takes exactly the same form – even in adjacent paragraphs. To edit one’s own stuff is an exercise in self-humiliation.

Cleanliness and delight

The BBs both read through their ablutions and are not shower people. The unused shower is in the en suite and therefore denied to guests. To ensure their cleanliness a shower is being installed over the bath. As the photo shows (awkwardly shot prone on the bathroom floor) further readjustment will be needed since the bath is equipped for readers not showerers.




MORE ABLUTIONARY EXPENSE Imperially I am 6 ft 1½ in. tall; metrically that’s a nigglingly precise 1.8669 m. The en suite hand-basin is 800 mm high, standard for such fitments and well below that part of my body indelicately referred to as my groin or crutch – take your pick. Rinsing my face I must bend down like a croquet hoop. This irritation will shortly be addressed so here’s the “Before” pic.

TOUCHED BY JOY For months the final chapter of the novel (carrying two contrary options) has been clear in my head. But getting there from the penultimate chapter was a blank. I spent three days thinking. An idea and, more important, a technique based on event compression arrived and I rushed upstairs to turn them into words which were a delight to write. Time to rush downstairs to the exercise bike and to plug myself into the Ulysses audio. As luck would have it I’d reached the Castle of the Winds section (officially Aeolus) where Bloom visits the newpaper offices and the text is presented as series of cod news reports topped by headlines – which the actor-reader shouts aloud. Nostalgically hilarious. Double delight so I am twice blest. Bless you all

Novel progress 25/4/10. Ch. 22: 3890 words. Chs. 1 - 21: 94,115 words. Comments: Final third of final chapter remains. Or will it do a Topsy?

Byproducts of Spring

Spring is sprung, the grass is ris.
I wonders where the birdies is.
They say the birds is on the wing.
Ain't that absurd?
I always thought the wing was on the bird.
So says Anon (no it isn’t Ogden Nash nor e.e.cummings). So it’s time to get into the garden and perform familiar acts of self-flagellation. Or should I say it’s time for someone to mortify themselves. Here at Chez Bonden our thoughts are on higher things – literally. Both of us sit at our computers on the first floor and watch our neighbour Brian attack weeds in our garden with self-confessed enthusiasm. Brian will be paid but believe me we have no complaints.

A spring clean-out revealed two items which, like boomerangs, are hard to throw away. It would not only be irresponsible to toss these cutting devices into the dustbin it would be illegal. One of us must transport them to les flics. But that in itself opens up risks; being in possession on the public roads is also illegal. Perhaps I’ll have to use my angle grinder and render them anonymous, like the verse.

The knife dates back to Mrs BB’s dad – a chef – who used it in his kitchen. There’s a touch of sentiment but it’s surplus to requirements. The herb-chopper (I’m sure Lucy will know the French word) looks charming but is being discarded because of its ineffectuality. For one thing it requires a special wooden bowl to work properly. But even then it must bow the knee to a combination of a pair of scissors and grandson Zach’s Melamine drinking cup.

Novel progress 13/4/10. Ch. 20: 913 words. Chs. 1 - 19: 85,903 words. Comments: Hatch bollocked for over-writing.

A must for those who share beds

Routine aids retirement – not just because imagination is at a low ebb (though it is) but because it reduces the quotidian burden: putting on socks, cleaning teeth, checking for vital signs, deciding what to do if vital signs aren’t apparent. Routine is vital in moving from the temptations of the grave to an upright state, underpants in place, ready to face another day. Getting up, in fact.

Technology also plays a part. I rise first and enter the en suite to perform what passes for my ablutions during which I tell myself that old age justifies diminishing standards of hygiene. I note from the dictionary ablution includes the washing of sacred vessels but here this practice has fallen into desuetude. When I re-emerge Mrs BB leaves her place beneath the phospherescent glare of the digital clock that so discombobulated Lucy and we immediately make the bed.

Any spouse who fails to share this ritual is a logistical heretic. Making the bed as a couple takes about 38 seconds, as a singleton it can take five minutes and generates much irritation. Technology contributes in the form of a fitted bottom sheet. Does anyone use unfitted ones? Pure whimsy is the only possible reason. I calculate we have made the bed as a couple 18,185 times and can be considered experts

A duvet would speed things up and we have often used one in hotels. But if we became used to a duvet would we fight for covering? As it is sheets, cellular blankets and coverlet are so generously proportioned this is not necessary. The upholstered bed-head was custom made since furniture shops seem to favour wrought-iron structures similar to farm gates.

Novel progress 18/2/10. Ch. 15: 2346 words. Chs. 1 - 14: 63,137 words. Comments: Hatch dines out but there's more on the menu than he expected.

News from the other side of the fence

Since six out of my ten links are women this post should prove esoterically instructive. My subject is public urinals, following a visit to one equipped with a twee little bowl for three-year-olds. Hygienic chinaware is not an obvious cause of poignancy yet this was my reaction, possibly influenced by Blake in the latest and last of The Guardian’s poetry booklets.

The bowl was unpatronised and forlorn, coming as it did at the end of a line of higher and wider orifices for adults. Its tininess spoke of latent persecution. Little child what ails thee? I imagined myself saying to a crying infant whose tears were providing an additional libation to more conventional fluid flow. That I’m here and not on remand confirms I kept this sentiment to myself.

Public urinals are not really for little boys. Some are so austere as to discourage the function for which they are provided. Jugoslavia in 1965 led the world in causing men – in extremis up to that moment – to ask whether they were really capable of discharging their obligations there and then. The most luxurious evacuation I experienced was underground in Germany where there were back-lit niches containing men’s toiletries and an impeccably groomed sixty-year-old Wagnerian lady to receive my pfennigs. There may have been carpets.

Once urinals were flushed by a cistern and ball-cock arrangement. Now some are flushed immediately in response to that which has just happened. This is both abrupt and accusatory. Protection against unwanted splashing is not best served by bowls; stainless steel troughs found in the more rudimentary sports changing rooms are far more effective but have a dismal industrial look. Unlikely to attract a sonnet.

Novel progress 3/2/10. Ch. 14: 0 words. Chs. 1 - 13: 58,239 words. Comments: Roof falls in on Clare but it's not the expected roof.

The road not taken. But let's imagine...

A week before I became sixteen, when hangings were still public and packs of wolves roamed the Dales, I started work. Forty-four years later I retired. Two years of freelance followed as I waited for Mrs BB to join me in retirement. End-to-end scribbling except for two years repairing RAF radio equipment and perhaps an accumulated six weeks spent looking for work. But suppose I'd done something different?

Ian Jack, Guardian columnist and former editor of Granta was reflecting on an alternative life as a plumber. A craft with none of the basket-weaving associations the word so frequently attracts: intellectually and manually demanding (think of central heating systems), useful to society, well-paid, independent. I would be a bad plumber but that's because I lack training and experience. With them I might still be a bad plumber. But it's an interesting thought. How about you?

Jack ends his piece with the most English of questions: How would you feel if your daughter decided to become a plumber? Ah, England.

Novel crib as promised. Provisional title "Searching the Daily Telegraph".
Andrew Hatch, fortyish, divorced, tumbles from production engineer to welding consumables salesman. Loses job, exposed to the chill winds of Thatcher Britain.
Clare Lowther, fortyish, from wealthy family, physics at Wadham, stratospheric IT management jobs. Unsatisfactorily married (three-year-old son) following quixotic gesture to present spouse. Unemployed, looking for change. Both meet (not necessarily carnally) under unforeseen circumstances and in unfamiliar environment. CL - Physical details: thin rather than slender, no bust, slightly elongated face, small upwards curving mouth which appears to emphasise two central incisors, large dark-ringed eyes, curly hair cropped close with some grey, competent and confident (sexually and professionally), impatient with idiots, breathy voice.

Can't see it; haven't got it

I have three roles in Mrs BB’s kitchen: to wash up, to lift things down from high shelves and to observe. Recently I observed blind baking beans in action, preventing that culinary solecism whereby pastry case and tart contents combine. I recognised their function but couldn’t remember having seen this procedure before. It turned out Mrs BB had bought the beans two years ago. And before? Real beans, but “they’d begun to look a little secondhand”.

I wondered if cooking beans end up in that destination I identify as the Food Processor Bermuda Triangle involving tools for comparatively rare but very specific tasks (eg, a melon baller). So rare that when the need arises one bodges rather than look for the tool. The phenomenon reaches its expensive apogee when a food processor is “put away” rather than being left on the work surface. “Not in a well organised kitchen,” replied Mrs BB a trifle frostily.

I AM NOT SEDUCED by perfumed toilet products. My preferred shampoo is Head and Shoulders which has a chemically smell and an in-yer-face aim (gets rid of dandruff). My favourite soap is Wright’s Coal Tar. If I could find a tooth-paste flavoured with petrol I would buy it. Yes, I know, it’s a man’s thing and its finest expression is a deep love of Swarfega (alas, now newly packaged). Used by garage mechanics for cleaning oily hands it is a luminescent green gel which feels excitingly slick to touch and has a hypnotically techno smell. It’s at its best when taken from an industrial-size container and it not only works well but better than you could ever expect. Welcome to this blog.

Novel progress (Working title: Bloggers Unite). Chapter one: 3420 words, Chapter two: 3806 words. Chapter three: 698 words.