Browsing lifted to a new level

Given the high standards of literacy and articulacy commentators to this blog have shown, a post about ABE Books is probably unnecessary. But just in case…

ABE is an example of where the web has not just altered the scope of an activity, it has changed its nature. What’s more it helps a deserving and generally under-funded stratum of the retail world.

ABE is an umbrella under which shelter 13,000 second-hand-book shops (Gosh, that’s hard to hyphenate.) round the world, providing them with exposure and a reference service way beyond individual resources. And using ABE has unexpected charms.

There’s a British author called John Lodwick, killed in a car crash in the sixties, whom I read with enthusiasm. His books are long out of print but I decided to push out the ABE boat. My trawl brought in seven or eight titles. But the charm came from where the Jiffy-bags were filled. One was in Tennessee, another in Pennsylvania. Hard to see how those shops would otherwise have got my custom.

There is a tiny catch. Some of the books cost a mere 50 cents but, not surprisingly, packing and postage is several multiples of that. I for one don’t object.

The Lady Vanishes

Imbued with foolish pride, I devoted my August 11 post to a photograph of a bookshelf I made for the French house. I apologised for not having a usable photograph of the adjacent spiral staircase which I admitted to be the main reason why we bought the house in the first place. Unimpressed by my DIY carpentry Plutarch offered this stern comment: “With hindsight perhaps you would have applied the Pentax to the handrail. We are the poorer for the omission.”

I did have a photograph of the staircase taken when we first inspected the house. Unfortunately my wife, in the last stages of hypothermia, stood in the foreground and wouldn’t have thanked me for publicising her in this state.

Whether she will thank me for the solution of this problem is another matter. But here is the staircase without my wife, thanks to Adobe Photoshop Elements – the software that rolls back time. It isn’t the best of photographs but it wasn’t the best of March days.

Plutarch, will this do?

How do you get two from one?

Unlike Duke Senior in As you like it who talked about “sermons in stones” (I confess; I had to look up his name) my horizons are set on much lower, far less spiritual horizons. Take this banal piece of kitchen equipment. According to our resident Director of Culinary (and other) Affairs this is a beater – perhaps a hand beater even though it is powered – used for cake mixes, egg whites and batters, frequently pre-empting the food processor because it’s easier to clean. It cost £8 back in the early eighties.

No sermons here but there is room for techno-speculation. Basically it’s a 100 watt electric motor shrouded in plastic. The more interesting part is how the rotation provided by the motor armature is taken through 90 deg (making the beater easier to use) and then split in order to drive the two beater blades.

The first part is easier to understand and is probably based on a much, much simpler variant of the crown wheels found in a car differential. In effect two open-faced gears engaging at right-angles.

Splitting the drive is more mysterious since the most obvious solutions are mildly complex and potentially expensive. Given the price and the fact that the beater was made in China these seem unlikely. I can’t wait until the thing fails and I can pull it apart and find out. Alternatively, if there’s anyone out there….

Occasionally I'm constructive

Here’s proof that – thanks to M. Chauvel’s sauteuse (see Aug 10) – I was able to fashion the mortice-and-tenon joints necessary for the freestanding bookshelf. And no, the thing isn’t falling apart. The photo was taken through a wide-angle lens on my well-loved Pentax. Hence the curvaceous verticals.

Above the bookshelf is the underside of the wooden spiral staircase that persuaded us – more than anything else – to buy the house in France. Alas I don’t have a usable picture of the operative side of the staircase. A shame. No step structure was duplicated and the glossy black wooden handrail was polished by the passage of hands over at least 130 years.

The house walls were nearly a metre thick and resembled the masonry equivalent of Peanut Brittle. Piercing the wall to create another window was a hazardous business; small holes tended quite rapidly to become big holes. That was the job of the maçon who also provided a sort of sous-titre service when the dialect of the artisans proved hard to decode.

These boots were made for...me!

Looking at these boots is like seeing my face in the mirror when I shave of a morning. A page – nah! a dozen chapters - from my personal history.

They were bought in 1952 or 1953 and cost, I think, £5. Their only defect was the laces which quickly gave up the ghost and were replaced by what you see – strangely waxed nylon. A year later they accompanied me on a month’s course at the Outward Bound Mountain School at Eskdale in the Lake District.

Their function would have been more apparent in their original form. I was besotted with rock climbing and these were – are – climbing boots. But in those days the soles were covered in nails. Hard metal tricounis round the toes, softer hobs over the rest. Nails were going out of fashion since they wore away the holds on established routes. At a later stage the nails were replaced with moulded rubber soles.

I was never a good rock climber but I loved the mountains. In any case I’d moved to London and it was harder to get to the places that matter. For various reasons ski-ing became the easier option and the boots went into the attic. We moved house several times, each time posing the question about what could be discarded. Not surprisingly the boots survived. Junking them would have been like throwing away my face.

M. Chauvel's finest hour

Another story about our techno-hero plumber.

Because the house in France had no damp-proof course crystals formed on the inside walls up to a metre from the floor. I was told they were saltpetre, one of the constituents of gunpowder. Painting over them only delayed their reappearance. So what was the cure? Put furniture in front of the visible areas, advised one French pragmatist.

I decided to make a freestanding book-shelf unit for that very purpose. I also decided to secure shelves and uprights with mortice-and-tenon joints (see drawing). Monsieur Chauvel, plombier extraordinaire, found me fashioning one of the slots with a power drill and a chisel. “A sauteuse would be better,” he said.

I didn’t know exactly what a sauteuse was although I had an inkling. I shrugged my shoulders (the sort of thing I found myself doing in M. Chauvel’s company). He disappeared briefly, returning with a jigsaw – the power tool, not the time-waster. “Drop it in when you’ve finished,” he said. I completed the unit three times quicker than I’d expected.

Let’s just reflect on the enormity of that gesture: a busy artisan lending one of the tools of his trade to, arguably, the most eccentric of his customers. Twelve years on I still can’t get over it.

Soldering can make you happier

If a little learning is dangerous, so’s a lot. Especially with electricity. Electrical hyper-sensitivity leads me to worry about the three-pin plug that’s warm when it shouldn’t be and about a woman I know with a physics degree who yanks on the flex of her electric kettle to pull out the plug.

And about my dear late father-in-law who I found poking into the central heating timer with a screwdriver. “It’s all right,” he said, “it works on gas.”

Electricity’s ability to destroy is awesome. Unions between cables and terminals are potential weak points and in some cases the risk can be reduced by soldering rather than just wrapping.

Soldering is fun. Roughen the terminal and the cable end with emery paper, coat each separately with molten solder, wind the cable round the terminal, and apply heat. Two becomes one almost immediately and conductivity is perfect. No worries about the union slackening through vibration. The RAF taught me to solder for free. I am at least grateful to them (it?) for that.

Two: not enough; three: too many

A mountie pursues a criminal through frozen wastes. Always the criminal is one jump ahead. The mountie has an idea. He sits in a clearing, takes out a bottle of gin, a bottle of vermouth and a jar of olives. As he opens the gin, the criminal rushes out from the trees. “No, no, no! The vermouth goes in first, stupid!”

I am able to invoke the mystique of the dry martini in Works Well because it is the product of liquid technology, better known as chemistry. When the tastes of gin and vermouth are mixed they create a third taste. There’s a technical chemistry name for this but I forget. Too old, too many martinis.

The Americans invented this pillar of civilised society but they continue to be in danger of corrupting it. All these jokes about wafting the cork of the vermouth bottle over the gin. Why not just drink straight gin? Also, a martini on the rocks (as opposed to the rockless martini straight up), much favoured in the Land of the Free, continuously dilutes the drink as the cubes melt.

Given that there are metaphorical criminals out there, hiding in the trees of blogland, I wouldn’t be fool enough to say which are my preferred martini proportions. However, the gin should be Tanqueray and the vermouth Noilly Prat. Also I must confess to my personal Albigensian heresy – I have been drawn to the Gibson, where two silverskins replace the olive.