Heads can ache as well as backs

Apart from two years in the fifties, I worked on newspapers and consumer/business/technical magazines from 1951 until 1995. When in 1959 I wrote to Mrs BB’s father to ask for her hand (the tradition then) he agreed, even though he was never sure journalism was a real job. He was a chef, working 6½ days a week.

My two-year blip involved RAF national service. After trawling my psyche the RAF decided I was capable of understanding airborne radio equipment. Basic training (Learning to kill with a bayonet. Avoiding venereal disease. etc) added to technical training took almost a year after which I repaired VHF transmitters/receivers in a large non-air-conditioned shed in Singapore. However incurable athlete’s foot took over and after very primitive and futile treatment I ended up near Doncaster modifying radar antennae used on Lancaster bombers (see pic).

None of which is terribly interesting except to prove that in a mainly sedentary professional life I have also worked manually. Received wisdom says manual work is harder than sitting-down work. I didn’t find this so. Admittedly I wasn’t digging holes or assembling Ford Anglias but I used screwdrivers, soldering irons, Avometers, and some delicacy.

The repair work was complex and I needed to study a large circuit diagram. I found it fairly entertaining but, more particularly, it was a finite world. By comparison a thousand-word article on fork-truck masts, initially at least, presents a huge range of options. An inverted pyramid of work, some of which isn’t entirely enjoyable.

No, I’m not saying I’d rather have been a navvy. Hard work’s where you find it, although most sophists work at desks.

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.

A moral query and a small milestone

Talking to my neighbour Andy about the Battle of Britain I found he was a WW2 planes nut. As I am. He lent me treasured books on the subject, saying I’d be astonished by their prices. - two cost 15 shillings each, £0.75 these days. But it was their narrow-margin pages and occasionally indistinct pix that evoked those distant days; even in 1961 publishers were mean with paper. I’ve raised this subject before. Is it legitimate to idolise engines of destruction? Andy says if you lived through the war as a child (I did, he didn’t), fearing oblivion and buoyed up by very clever British propaganda perhaps it’s understandable if not forgivable.

Did you know what was the fastest piston-engine plane ever produced in the UK? The Supermarine Spiteful, of course.

ENDLICH Following Plutarch’s Homeric 1700-word final assessment the novel, Gorgon Times, is finished. It is possibly an unpopular story, but I wanted to tell it and I enjoyed every moment, even the endless revisions. The greatest pleasure came from details, even page-long scenes, which popped up unforeseen as if there were some delightful conspiracy between my conscious and subconscious mind. It is the best novel I’ve written which doesn’t of course mean it’s any good. Plutarch has been very kind (“driven as much by sentiment as moral sense” which made me proud) and others, presently reading the MS, may give me a hint or two.

One strange experience. Revising it for the nty-nth time I came upon a deliberately emotional scene near the end and my throat tightened – BB the author manipulating BB the reader! Jilly Cooper, not one of my touchstone authors, says the same thing happened to her. I should add she was reading her most recent novel, not mine.

Cobblestones from the Czech Republic

LOST IMAGES The half-a-dozen photos I took in Prague with my mobile phone appear to be irretrievable (hence improvisation above). Damn technology. The only shot I miss occurred in a restaurant where I ordered Grandmother’s Leek and Potato Soup in a Bread Bowl. And that’s how it came – soup contained in a hollowed-out disc-shaped loaf. Was I supposed to eat the loaf as well? The waiter shrugged dismissively.

MEMORIALS? In Paris and London history caught up long ago; in Prague it’s still being written. At the city’s Museum of Communism a film prefaces the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Slightly older versions of the youths being cracked on the head by the security forces (“Don’t hit women,” one of them shouts) are to be seen on today’s streets, free if not gilded with life’s luxuries. On those same streets magnificent fin de siècle terraces are interspersed with dirigiste egg-boxes imposed by the then Soviet masters. Should they be torn down or left as mementoes of the country’s second imprisonment after the Nazis?

NOT IN THE ROOM Our hotel is called Design Hotel Elephant. And why not? But I’d like to rearrange the words.

TITANIA’S DRINK Sitting in a rapaciously priced Old Town bar waiting for the clock tower to reveal its wonders (disappointing – the homunculi don’t emerge) we order Rose Drink (0.1 l of rose (not rosé) wine, strawberries, mint, rose petals, water) because it costs a mere £0.75. “A nice summer drink,” says Mrs BB. She’s right.

A TOUR AVOIDED From the same bar I see a tourist office decorated externally with large gilt words apparently alluding to the events of 1989: DILIGENTIA – DIGNITATIS – MEMORES – OPTIMA INTENTI. The last two worry me. Aren’t they paving stones on the road to Hell?

The greatest spectator sport

Hay Festival, Woodstock of the Mind according to Bill Clinton, who spoke here several years ago, continues to throw pearls before swine.

As Chief Swine I fell in love with the interpreter to the last three French presidents, explored the Credit Crunch with Mrs Moneypenny of The Financial Times, watched Kazuo Ishiguro discourse gravely on his latest novel (?) Nocturnes, received instructions on being a philosopher from A. C Grayling, was disappointed by Lord Robert Winston on the downsides of science and am now waiting to hear the editor of The Guardian interview Harry Evans former editor of The Sunday Times. More follows.

The star turn was a double-header in which a steely lawyer, Philippe Sands, interviewed first Sir Jeremy Greenstock, former British ambassador to the UN, then Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, present French ambassador to the UK, both involved in the build-up to the Iraq war. The irrestible force meeting two immovable objects as Sands relentlessly yet politely questioned two of the world’s foremost diplomats. You’ve seen all that on telly, you say. Oh no you haven’t.

These weren’t a couple of politicos lying their heads off. In precise words they described how each did everything possible, within their professional remit, to forestall the outbreak of war. Dates, official documents and witness testimony were invoked and the answers arrived in language that was all the more forceful for being emotionless. Judicial theatre at the highest level. Hay – you done it again.

HAY, FINAL DAY (for us). Anthony Beevor: (Stalingrad, Spanish Civil War) How the modern historian works and why the digital age will make things harder. Harold Evans (former Sunday Times editor). Why still-photo journalism matters in this video age; what can and can’t be published. Mike Mansfield (Left-leaning lawyer known for defending unpopular clients). Fuming about that morning’s news re. Israeli attack on aid flotilla. Ian Stewart: An attempt to simplify and popularise maths – total disaster. Martin Evans (Nobel-prize-winning laureate). Why stem cell research matters and what it may lead to.

Sentimentality takes different forms

Months ago I asked whether boy-babies responded more enthusiastically to toys rich in technical detail compared with those carved out of wood and sold for mega-pounds at Early Learning Centre. The post went to hell in a hack when Lucy and other former girl-babies revealed they’d preferred six-shooters and fire engines to dolls anyway. But atavism is never far away at Works Well.

Similarly I wondered why those fascinated with WW2 planes lost interest in the civil aircraft that succeeded them. I daydreamed whether boy-babies, now man-babies, felt more romantic about the utilitarian interiors of warplanes as cavities designed for one purpose alone. Having once sat in the cockpit of a Lancaster bomber during my RAF service I Googled the image (see above).

But forget all that. Almost adjacent on Google was this picture – the T (for transmitter) 1154 and R (for receiver) 1155 whereby the Lancaster kept in touch with other planes and the land it had left behind. Oh gentle but tolerant reader, believing old BB to have devoted his life solely to indulgent wordsmithing, I HAVE REPAIRED THAT KIT, blue/red/yellow knobs and all.


UGHHH Mrs BB, still a little fragile, made her first trip out today on snowy Hereford streets. We walked arm in arm encouraging a neighbour to comment on our decreptitude and triggering these alien Cockney words:

We've bin togevver nah for forty year,
And it don't seem a day too much,
There's not a lidy livin’ in vuh land
As I'd swap for mi dear Old Dutch.
(Altogevver, nah...)

Sometimes the cold dash of West Yorkshire tradition has its place.

Novel progress 12/1/10. Ch. 11: 3110 words. Chs. 1 - 10: 44,765 words. Comments: Hatch needs a woman, for various reasons.

Why I never invaded anywhere

Lee Enfield .303 rifle. The original design dates back to the turn of the century. But then the RAF was primarily into bombs.

Bren gun, known in the RAF as an LMG or light machine gun – so christened by some brass hat who never had to carry one.

Before the RAF capriciously decided I would be taught to repair radio equipment I underwent basic training - squarebashing (UK), boot camp (USA). I was warned about lying with loose women, about not brushing my teeth and about espousing the teaching of Bertrand Russell rather than those of the RAF’s Yahweh.

More important were: obedience to orders (including those requiring me to go out and get killed by the enemy) and killing skills. I’ll forgo the hysterical yet comical bayonet training and concentrate on the three loaded guns I discharged.

The first was a .22 rifle on a 25-yard range. One instructor got into position on the ground and another bawled explanations. When the prone instructor took aim silence descended and nervous anticipation rose. The discharge was like the tiniest of farts. Suppressing a snigger (which would have been unpleasantly punished) caused my sternum to ache.

I then shot a .303 Lee Enfield rifle on a 200-yard range. Did I hit the target? It didn’t matter. For me an enemy 200 yards away was a notional enemy, a mere theory. With the Bren gun we reverted to 25 yards. A burst required squeezing the trigger during the time taken to say “A thousand and one”. There was a caveat: “Don’t count to a thousand and one,” screamed the instructor.

Two bursts and the paper target tore apart, then – to my delight – detached itself from the holder and flew into the air. For the first time I had an inkling of why some men get addicted to shooting guns. Soon, however, I was wielding a soldering iron. Haven’t squeezed a trigger since.