Dogged to death by data

I blog for fun, I run the Belmont Rural website as a Sisyphean labour. Beforehand I edited the quarterly Belmont Voice for three years and it generated a parish-wide storm of apathy. When I closed the mag to start the website the parish, collectively, burst into tears. “Too late you inert bastards,” I said to myself.

That was five years ago. Website progress was glacial. I interviewed people, learned to unknot Dreamweaver and nobody cared. More recently I started blogging, then resumed the novel. At a time when I could have usefully closed the site it took off. Now emails pour in keeping me away from novel revision. I flew a kite about whether Belmont Rural deserved to endure and, alas, I got lots of email support.

With projects like these it pays to take a long-term view. I started Voice because I was a retired journalistic smartyboots and wanted to wipe the face of my neighbours. Amazingly it attracted advertising which allowed the parish council, who financed the printing and distribution, to cut their budget. Reader response (other than the aforementioned bout of sobbing) was zilch and I found myself on a treadmill of deadlines.

Websites aren’t governed by deadlines and there was the technical attraction of starting up from nothing. However, once websites become popular they can overwhelm you. This morning, when I should have been carving Chapter Three (which some of you have read in its embryonic form) into something more readable and which is as hard as anything I’ve ever done, I had to break off and instruct a website emailer on verse scansion so that his “poetic” contributions didn’t grind my teeth.

Like WW I contain multitudes and they’re getting me down.

Editing progress: May 2, 2010. Rather alarming. Untouched, the MS totalled 99,407 words. After four chapters this has shrunk to 97,964. If this slash-and-burn average is maintained the total will drop to 92,204. You may well ask why I wrote all this unnecessary stuff anyway.

Zach firmly believes in the mystery

Why we creakily leave our beds 07.32 on December 25. (1) Who left the strange footprints? Could there be clues in the thrice-bitten carrot, the cup of water (now empty) and the disappeared chocolate digestive? (2) For a modern-day lad like Zach a stocking is no longer sufficient; he needs a sack. (3) A motorbike! How did Santa know?

As they say on the wine lists, the Beef Wellington saga follows.

Later, I went Gregorian

An unpleasant image pops up. Primary school during the war with one of our class being disciplined - a girl from the privileged back row gets something wrong, is hauled into the front and starts crying. The teacher, a shriek-voiced harridan called Cox, has wittily taken a bucket and is inviting the girl to fill it with tears. My reaction? There but for...

Zooming back I see more of the classroom. Hung on the wall are lengths of stiffish pink card carrying multiplication tables. I remember what preceded these aides memoires. Without telling us why the aforesaid Cox asked us orally to multiply pairs of numbers and then chalked up the answers. From the new cards we learned the sequences as if they were plainsong and I can hear those rhythmic treble voices even now. For some reason seven-times was the hardest.

Since my education was all downhill from then I'm ignorant of what schools get up to but I understand plainsong was junked. Dismissed as learning by rote, and the emphasis switched to an intellectual understanding of numerical relationships. If I'd been born thirty years later perhaps I'd have picked it up but I doubt it. Another burden to carry into adult life. Whereas chanting was an unequivocal success. Eleven-times? Ah, we didn't go that far.

Novel progress 13/12/09: Ch. 8: 1209 words. Chs. 1 - 7: 33,000 words. Comment: Visit by Zach no spur to literary creation; caught up a little afterwards

Into the mindless world

The inset shows (imperfectly) the door to discomfort – discomfort that must be endured for six more weeks.

Presently school children are at a loose end. Their parents take them to swimming pools where they mess around, taunting adults engaged in length swimming. As a result I have temporarily withdrawn my labour from the South Wye Leisure Centre in Fownhope. But I need some form of mindless physical activity so it’s back to the exercise bike which I keep in the garden shed.

Swimming offers certain incidental aesthetic pleasures; the ex-bike none at all. Besides, it’s surrounded by garden tools, links with another alien world. As a very minor act of revenge I clip my MP3 player to the blade of a hanging spade, stick in the ear-plugs and pedal away on a sweaty, dusty journey that goes nowhere.

The MP3 player contains over a thousand tracks varying in length from a Schubert lied to a Bruckner symphony movement. But alas the ex-bike imposes its own cultural environment. Try as I might I cannot listen to, say, Quartet for the end of time while fake pedalling. So my huge repertoire is reduced to four collections (say sixty tracks) of the only pop songs I regard as worth listening to, most MoR and most at least twenty years old.

Yesterday I concluded with The Pogues’ The band played Waltzing Matilda, the best anti-war song I know of. This afternoon I’ll resume with Barbra Streisand’s Don’t rain on my parade. It’s OK but I’d rather be swimming.

Calling Gardener's Question Time

NUMBER THREE IN AN OCCASIONAL AND RELUCTANT SERIES Anyone mildly familiar with Works Well knows I am temperamentally unsuited to gardening. Physiologically too. My pendant stomach gets trapped between my rib-cage and my thighs; I cut a poor figure among the blooms.

But to earn sight of the rugby this afternoon I was honour-bound to garden this morning. To dig out a clump of rampant marguerites I reached for the fork but I don’t know why. Forks simply bend in the face of hard toil – a bit like me. Useless. Then I remembered the narrow-blade spade I’ve already blogged about. Unlike its bigger brother it doesn’t bite off more than it can excavate. And it’s more agile when delivering the vertical thrusts that chop the subject into manageable squares.

The marguerites (I refused my wife’s first explanation of what I’d done; even by my standards digging out daisies sounds like pie’s-ball work) are now in the green bag and my heart rate is down into the low hundreds. But someone tell me – what are forks for?

PLUS A BONUS And perhaps I needn’t wait for post-mortem paradise to be rewarded for my horticultural efforts. Remember the Cote de Beaune Villages bought in the 1990s to decorate the French house? Opened a few minutes ago, it poured out light brown, had an encouraging citrousy bouquet and tasted… like burgundy! My wife who’d agreed to taste it after I’d done so (no fool she) upped her thumb too and it’s going into a daube.

A case for Crop-Dad

Modified (See OS comment: Before - above; after - below)

This chap is an adolescent belonging to a jury of his peers called Keane. Recently he and the others shouted themselves hoarse at the Oh-two (sorry, can’t do the subscript) Stadium while plucking electronically-amplified guitars. Why do I know this? Younger daughter and her daughter drove to Greenwich, shouted back at the entertainment and flashed off their digitals indiscriminately.

Twas my job to trawl PhotoShop, crop their efforts and retrieve lost detail. More fun than attending the event itself. Pop musicians demand extreme cropping and I enjoyed sawing off the tops of their sweaty heads to give each his very own Massif Central. Brightness, contrast, hue and saturation tweaks on this one revealed the microphone stand, previously invisible. Great software used in a great cause: yoof culture.

THEY’VE DONE IT BEFORE! I’m impressed by companies who go the extra mile (or centimetre). The doors and drawer fronts are being replaced in our fitted kitchen. The work could not be completed in a single day but we weren’t left scrabbling access to our crocks and cutlery. Note the tape “handles” on anything that opened - replaced the following day by the specified knobs. Good on you, Lord Kytchener Kitchens (Yes, that’s the way they spell it and the explanation is quite boring.)

A sort of secular prayer

POST NUMBER 150. Try something different.

Each Tuesday and Thursday I swim 90 lengths of an 18 m pool, just slightly more than a mile. This takes about 49 minutes. Because I swim crawl my face is mostly submerged and the non-aqueous world is glimpsed only in two-second bursts while taking on air. Otherwise I commune with tile patterns suffused pale blue, the roar of breath exhaled underwater and the passage of numbers through my mind. Those numbers are gathered into sets.

Lengths 1 to 11. Sense of burden and a need to struggle out of single numbers; 10 lengths is pseudo-single-number; 11 marks first real – albeit minor - achievement.
Lengths 12 to 22. Dog days. Length 15 is 1/6th of total but passes uncelebrated.
Length 22 and a bit. Quarter distance. Fraction makes it messy. Uncelebrated.
Lengths 23 – 30. One-third distance. Worthwhile milestone but must avoid thinking about 60 lengths that remain.
Lengths 31 – 45. Long haul, preferably done mindlessly. Halfway there.
Length 46. Vital number! Future now smaller than past.
Lengths 47 – 60. Sense of swimming downhill. Mild exhilaration. Glance sideways at other swimmers doing breast-stroke, head out of the water. Accelerate and blast past.
Lengths 61 – 90. Each length increases laddish tendencies. Legs kick frothily, turns become flashier. Finally, climb out of pool, careful not to breathe hard, off to changing room without a backward glance.

NOTE: Frequent flashes of terror that lengths have been miscounted are quite normal.

It's no fun at all

Just back from the garden after l½-hr work (my absolute limit) trimming the ivy and other ill-defined tasks. I need to work off my resentment, so here’s a list of horticultural ineluctables.

(1) Why is it that how ever many implements you take out of the shed, you always need another? And then another?

(2) Gardener’s World is like watching sado-masochistic porn when you get the heeby-jeebies over a pin-prick. There are people who seem to relish digging. Mind you, the earth they dig is remarkably free from rocks, roots and compressed density.

(3) Trimming ivy doesn’t sound much. What’s a pain is hooking out the cuttings without wrecking the contents of the flower bed.

(4) “But you enjoy the garden when it’s full of colour,” says my wife. Cruelly I point out that she enjoys using her well-honed teeth but finds it difficult to remain philosophical while the dental hygienist goes a’scritching.

(5) A garden creeps up on you like a mugger. Something that didn’t need doing this morning, suddenly requires attention now you’ve got a belly-full of lunch.

(6) Poets rhapsodise about gardens. But can you imagine Dylan Thomas doing topiary? One Plutarch doesn’t foretell a flock of horticultural rhymesters.

OK, I’m purged. Now for a chapter or two of Walter Pater.