It wasn't all Proust and Ulysses

In Britain I’d have (reluctantly) identified H as working-class. But this happened to be Pittsburgh and so he was blue-collar. H’s origins were one reason why we became pals. Since both of us were appallingly under-educated our friendship depended on what we said rather than what we were. He saw me as a foreign exotic, given to useless long words and my pretentiousness tickled him. I delighted in his concise one-liners seemingly riven from a William Goldman script.

Most of these are now lost, one remains. I mentioned that X, a vertically challenged colleague, had a remarkably tall wife. “And X wouldn’t have it any other way,” said H lubriciously (an adverb he would have poked fun at).

H was brought up in Mount Oliver, on a cliff to the south of Piitsburgh overlooking the Golden Triangle ( At the confluence of Allegheny and Monongahela rivers; Mount Oliver to the right.). As a result we spent laddish evenings there in a bar called Moike’s which I would never have dared enter alone. Moike communicated via insult, it was all he knew. We always drank 25-cent beers and I asked H what would happen if I ordered a martini. “Moike would slam the gin and vermoot bottles on the bar and say: make it yourself.”

Political correctness may not have been invented then but it would been badly received in Moike’s. Mostly the talk was coarse or of sport. I liked baseball and football, could get along with basketball but Moike’s customers liked hockey (the qualifier “ice” was unnecessary in the USA) and I was often left out. Nobody cared about that.

Evenings ended with a hot-sausage sandwich which was impossible to eat tidily. I would give my right eye for one just at this moment.

Did we set the world to rights? No

Nothing sadder than an empty. This sloe gin from Lucy should have been traded for a jar of Mrs BB’s marmalade. But we were less happily engaged during the narrow 2010 marmalade-making window and anyway Lucy made her own marmalade that year. I offered (sort of) to return the bottle but Lucy said it was OK. The sloe gin was multi-layered and adult in flavour which was to be expected, given the source.

Ginned up yesterday I reflected on meeting blogging acquaintances. One bonus is that the stage-setting questions (When? Why? How?) can be junked because both sides know the answers. With Lucy the introductory/felicitative phase added up to zero: she phoned us at 7.30 am then dropped into our car an hour or so later. In both cases it was like resuming a conversation broken off ten minutes previously.

No time to wonder whether we would get on because “getting on” was already happening. Engine noise precluded plane chat and interrupting the Lumix would have been cultural vandalism. At lunch I may have prepared several devastating questions but already Tom and I were wallowing in the RAF and electronics. For the Mol-walk afterwards we split into same-gender couples and lo we were soon saying goodbye.

Where had it all gone? Of course there were remembered characteristic flashes, exchanges which confirmed, IMHO, things were working as they should but – goodness me! – it seemed we had devoted ourselves entirely to pleasure. And my knowledge of Rilke hadn’t advanced a bit. Shame, really. Query: Are the best social encounters those that pass in a blur?

NOVELS Gorgon Times - with several agents (three have turned it down). A Stall Recovered – now being assessed by Plutarch. Blest Redeemer – 1423 words.

Alas, I cannot claim to be limitless

A question arises: is Rouchswalwe a toper? Definitely not. Toping is drinking to excess and although beer flows through her blog like the Drac flows through Grenoble, she remains clear-sighted – even starry-eyed – enough to produce vigorous, allusive prose, and poetry, unaffected by alchohol.

Recently I scientifically tested her consumption and she cheerfully responded. See http://5fingerplatz.blogspot.com/2011/09/me-gustaria-una-cerveza.html

I now return the favour.

Until recently this itinerary was bi-annual. My companion, C, is fifteen years younger, physicist turned website designer, creator of a web-based library, a fairly extreme left-winger, enormously articulate, widely read and a forensic conversationalist. Since the mountain must go to Mahomet I turn up at Lewisham (SE London), we taxi to Greenwich and order a meal at Davy’s Wine Lodge. An absorbent meal with a mature zinfandel. I choose the wine since for all his abilities, C lacks a retentive palate.

We then stroll past the Cutty Sark to The Trafalgar, the best pub in London. Which at 2.30 pm, is empty. In a bow-fronted window overhanging the Thames we may look upstream to the heart of London, across the river to the financial skyscrapers and downstream to The Dome (which we watched being built). We then each drink five pints of real ale, The conversation is broken only by increasingly frequent absences at the Gents but a graph of consumption resembles the discharge rate for a capacitor (ie, one sharp peak followed an endless visit to the plains). Drinking ends at about 10 pm.

This is my limit since beer turns me into one of those maths problems involving a bath, a tap and a plughole. A mere conduit. The conversation is demanding, stretching me like Peter Rabbit to bursting point. It is an admirable justification for boozing.

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.

With this I brook no argument

My perfect cup of coffee (black, always black) has its roots in the USA and has nothing in common with the doll’s-house cupful which accompanies a digestif. It is comparatively weak and I drink two mugs (ie, a surprisingly large total of 700 ml) with my brunch. Arriving at perfection has taken an adult lifetime and cost several hundred pounds. These are the essential constituents:

MUG Bone china, William Morris pattern, large handle, parallel sides. There should be no compromises – aesthetic or material – with such an item in daily use. Were it to be broken I would need a week in a residential care home.

COFFEE Three moderately heaped teaspoonfuls of Fairtrade Colombian ground, bag secured by a crocodile clip (forget rubber bands, lengths of string, and especially “hopeful” folding), kept in the freezer. This coffee is in fact Guatemalan but I received it as a Christmas table present and the quality is very close.

PERCOLATOR A dozen others, all in working order, were discarded before I acquired this Krups costing £75, about three times the previous average. The most common failing was the manufacturer’s inability to design a valve between the percolator chassis and the jug that allowed the jug to be removed or installed without irritation. The Krups jug, possibly made from an aluminium alloy, is vacuum-insulated and may be set down without harming polished surfaces. A plastic filter is included but I augment this with a paper filter.
NOTE: Those who have read my novel, Gorgon Times, will already have met the Krups which plays an important role in defining the character of Jerry, Clare’s husband. I should add I am not Jerry.

A matter of some delicacy

Yesterday, those with fast reaction times may have noticed a Works Well post with a blog life of ten minutes. I was reflecting on my personal guidelines for blogging and on the unexpected late-life benefits blogging has brought me. Sentimentality got the better of my prose, hence the deletion. Here’s its replacement.

On the Fünffingerplatz blog the subject of beer is omnipresent, recently extended to traditional English pint glasses. I commented there were two types (the jug with a handle and the straight-sider), each representing the two sides of the class divide. This was disputed - in the nicest possible way. I offer this historical adumbration.

Once, nearly all pint glasses were straight siders, widening very slightly towards the top. Their obvious benefit was the thinness of the glass. In the fifties keg beer was introduced in the UK and was welcomed; its flavour was anodyne but its quality was consistent, unlike conventional pump beer then sold, wretchedly maintained, by many careless landlords.

A few years later, in reaction to keg beer (symbolised by Watney’s Red Barrel), the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) began. Drinkers were offered a much wider choice of pump beers served by landlords who understood the need to care for their pipes, etc. CAMRA was a middle-class initiative and its supporters, many of them Hooray Henries, insisted on straight-sided glasses. Keg beer lingered in pubs where drinkers seemed not to care about these newer beers and, in my mind, is associated with much thicker handled jugs with a discouraging mould line round the rim.

It is no longer PC to pretend to be objective about the UK class system and so I will leave it at that.