Oh sole mio

Do cobblers still exist? Not that they’ve received much help from me over the past decade. My footware routine is unvarying: buy trainers from M&S, wear them until they start pumping in rain water (less than a year), buy another pair, drop used pair into garbage bin.

In my youth all shoes were repaired. Our cobbler was a caricature. Short, hunched, bright-eyed, Mediterranean complexion, loquacious to the point of being prepared to talk to a ten-year-old. What about? I have no idea. All I remember is the backdrop – a huge table piled high with scraps of leather. Plus two items of technology.

In the corner a powerful mangle or wringer. Except that the rollers, instead of having parallel sides, mated convex with concave. Before attachment to the shoe the rough-cut flat sole was passed through the mangle giving it the contours of a shallow dish. I cannot imagine why this was necessary. Nor do I intend to embarrass my correspondents by asking them. Knowing why would require familiarity with those dark, cold, hungry years of Britain’s immediate post-war.

The other item (in fact there were several) was the sharpest knife in Christendom. The blade was hook-shaped and one tour of the newly attached sole was enough to remove all the overlap. As if the leather were a damp Digestive.

And then there was the smell. Ah…

I can’t match the lovely horticultural close-ups of my correspondents so here’s a long shot of part of our garden. It’s low maintenance.

A moment in the world of logistics

In cramped countries like Switzerland and Japan ground space is money. So companies put up high warehouses. But there are limits. A warehouse a mile high would cost a fortune. Putting goods into it – and getting them out – would take time and time is money.

Also, the higher you go the more expensive the equipment. At lower levels a forklift truck will do, beyond that hardware evolves until the system is completely automated. Big money.

A forklift benefits over automation in that it can “free range” – carrying goods at ground level, sometimes taking them out of the racking and loading directly on to a lorry. Most warehouses use forklifts.

When I wrote professionally about logistics, I visited a supermarket warehouse where it was conceded the height limit for a free-ranging forklift system had been reached. The vehicles were reach trucks, more stable variants of the counterbalanced forklifts most people know.

These trucks could lift to just over 11 m. Viewed from beneath this is some distance but I was on a walkway near the roof looking down. The truck cab looked microscopic; the mast uprights throbbed, twitched even groaned with the effort of holding the load that high. Journalists should avoid going anthropomorphic but in this case it was inescapable. In any case, it worked.

There's more to music than just notes

Concert organisers truckle to soloists. Their piece always precedes the interval so that they can be off the premises before I’ve reached the end of the ice-cream queue. You’d expect a concerto to provide the climax.

At least there’s an entr’acte with a piano concerto. Sometimes it’s more fun than the music. Three men, not wearing tuxedos (Why do I detest that unsuitable musicianly garb so much?) march on to the stage, clothe the Steinway in a duvet, turn it on its side, remove the legs, add more duvets, manhandle the rather sad looking parcel on to a trolley and then wheel the whole thing away very, very carefully. The audience at Birmingham last month granted a polite round of applause to the spectacle.

There’s more technology before the concert when the Steinway expert tweaks the machine according to the pianist’s preference but mere punters don’t get to see that. In compensation there was quite a lot of fiddling with the twin harps that feature in Shostakovich Five.

A concert grand must represent the ultimate in objects that can’t be mass-produced. I wondered how much they cost and was surprised to find that £50,000 is absolute tops and you can pick one up for £25,000. Apparently they don’t improve with age as a Guarnerius does.

Does clever quickly; simple takes time

In recommending Picasa as a neat way of cropping images Lucy was disdainful of Photoshop, describing it as “over-engineered”. I completely agree. Although my version is only Photoshop Elements (presumably for those who are technically challenged) nothing comes easily and I’ve never dared crack “layers” at all.

Just recently I wanted to join two photos side by side and turn them into a single file. I felt sure Photoshop would allow this simple task, yet the hours slid by. As is often the case with software the solution arrived by accident though I’ve now forgotten the exact Damascene moment. In case you’re wondering, go File > New > Photomerge Panorama, which is not exactly intuitive. The Help was no help at all if you weren’t aware of that key word photomerge.

And yet… I needed a photo of a F4U Corsair, a WW2 carrier-based fighter. I found a good one but (see top pic) it had all that garbage in the foreground. Could Photoshop do the job? It could, the tool and its usage were self-explanatory, and in an hour – voila! My first attempt at such an elaborate touch-up. But I still haven’t forgiven PE for the photomerge obscurity.

Those that can, do; those that can't, blog

One of the themes running through Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin novels of the Napoleonic era is competence. Jack Aubrey is a supremely competent ship’s commander who justifiably gets to fly “blue at the mizzen” (ie, is promoted admiral) by the end of the twenty-book series. His surgeon Stephen Maturin competently opens up an injured seaman’s skull, “rouses up his brains” in the words of the crew, and covers his work with a carapace made from a silver coin hammmered and shaped by the ship’s blacksmith.

More competent than either is Aubrey’s bosun, Barrett Bonden. When a line needs throwing with great accuracy, or the jolly boat needs taking in through surf, or a hostile vessel needs boarding, Bonden’s your man.

I adopted this name when commenting on a piece about horticulture on Plutarch’s blog. When I started my own blog I thoughtlessly used the same name. And now it has come home to haunt me. The fact is I am not competent! My recent pieces on converting LPs to CDs and using an angle grinder attest to this. I feel I am dishonouring the good bosun’s name.

I did ask Plutarch whether a more appropriate name would be Joe Plaice – the subject of Maturin’s daring surgery (see above). But Plutarch said time had debased that name which now sounds like a smartyboots West End fish and chippery. So BB stays but the act of contrition was necessary. I have only hi-jacked Bonden’s name, not his abilities.

A sort of spot-the-ball competition

Delays in the focussing/light assessing abilities of a cheap digital camera made it difficult to capture this particular moment during our Languedoc holiday. However, after a few boss shots I finally snatched proof that grandson Zach and son-in-law Darren appreciated the pool at our rented villa and we've booked the place for the same two weeks next year.

Studying the photo more closely I began to wonder just what the picture represents. Is Zach rising, has he reached the apogee, or is he falling? The angle of the strap on his life-jacket is no doubt significant to a trained aerodynamicist but that is just one more field where my knowledge could "crawl under a snake's belly wearing a top hat" (a phrase used by a RAF instructor teaching me - futilely - how to aim a rifle during national service).

However virtually everyone who supplies comments to this blog is better educated than me et j'attends avec impatience.

Diamonds not a timekeeper's best friend

Apart from a £5 digital Casio which I use to time my swimming (also while ski-ing, until old age took away my lift-pass), I have only owned two wrist-watches. Both Longines, both the subject of some sentiment.

The one on the left was a gift from my mother for my twenty-first which, incidentally, I spent at a military hospital in the Cameron Highlands in Malaya, suffering from terminal athlete’s foot. The one on the right was a thirtieth-wedding anniversary present from my wife. Both keep excellent time given their technology. Which means that the older watch, being mechanical, cannot match the younger, electrical one.

I am told that the older watch qualifies as an antique and would make squillions on eBay. I’d rather open my veins.

I mention this because I recently attended an auction where many watches were sold (Only of passing interest; I was there for wine and spent a fortune.). Some were encrusted with diamonds, some had three mini-dials within the main one, some had built-in magnifying glasses. None had faces to equal the clarity of either of mine. In both cases the Longines minute hand is so delicate and the minute divisions so precise you can tell time to 10 seconds – with analogue watches!

As Basil Fawlty said in another context – it’s so basic.

The slob's guide to LP - CD transfer

Sentiment pulled one way and the enormity of the task pulled another. Our disc turntable was a space-encroaching anachronism yet we still had 220 LPs. Convert the LPs into CDs then? But a pickup arm only functions in realtime. A complete transfer would take about 92 hours solid.

The decision was precipitated when we opted for a custom-made unit to hold the TV, the amp/tuner, the player, the VCR (now, of course, a DVD unit) and the CDs. One or two observations:

How likely are you to want to hear one of the Diabelli variations separate from the others. Not very, eh? Good, then simply record each side of the LP as two continuous chunks. However, with Schubert songs each will need its own track. Fiddly but necessary.

Clean and re-clean the LPs before playing them with a Dust Bug. You won’t eliminate the scratches and the needle will occasionally catch – usually when you’re buttering a slice of toast – causing you to rush in and clumsily give it a nudge. You could re-record but that’s not me. It probably won’t be you after 15 – 20 hr of this nit-picking work. Don’t despair. On the CD the repeated groove will be agony but with an underlay of comfort. It will right itself!

With 220 or more LPs there’ll be those you haven’t played for ages. Epiphanies await. In my case Schoeck’s “Notturno”.

Finally, after it was all done I swapped the turntable for a mobile phone.